


The Long Way Round to You

by Dryadical



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Devastating truths, Flying, Goats, Linux parallel processing up a tree, Listening to the walls, M/M, Running out of crisps, Spinning lace-weight goat yarn, fly-fishing on several levels, grading essays, tail with a mind of its own
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 24,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27568768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dryadical/pseuds/Dryadical
Summary: Simon runs away from Penny's couch, and stumbles into a new life without Baz, who is bereft. Eventually, they reconnect, but not before many adventures befall them.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 13
Kudos: 23





	1. Runaway

**Author's Note:**

> This is the story I want to read. I'm helplessly in love with Baz and Simon, and a whole expanding bunch of other folks, some from Carry On and Wayward Son, some of them folks I thought I made up but who are getting very interestingly independent lives of their own. 
> 
> I'm a bit of an iconoclast, so expect the unexpected.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon runs out of crisps, and it turns into a longer journey than he intended.

**~~ Simon ~~**

Ebb had a spell for calling her goats in for the night. It started running through my mind in the last few weeks that I lived at Penny's, as if someone were calling me out of the field into the fold, somewhere away, where I didn’t know.

Penny and Shep were up north for the weekend, chasing down a report of a cryptid; Baz was in France with his economics classmates at a financial conference; Dev was supposed to be on call for spelling my wings off, but when I got up that morning it was already two in the afternoon and I guess he figured I wouldn't call, because his phone just went to voicemail and I never reached him. 

I was out of crisps, which is perhaps the stupidest reason ever for running away from home, but that was about the level I was at. Crisp despair, and hearing goat homing calls.

Around about midnight I went up on the roof, I was that sick of sitting in the same sagging spot on Penny's couch. 

The moon was out, half full, low down in the west, turning a little orange, so I climbed on the parapet and flew up, way up to see the city under its light. It wasn't something I did very often, especially not in London, where I figured any nutter with a gun could pick me off, but I didn't care that night. 

It would have been a relief, really, to crash and burn on a London street. Get it over with, without doing it myself.

But no one shot at me.

And up in the sky, flying higher and higher watching London dwindle below me -- it was a freedom I hadn't felt in a long time. Maybe not ever. Freedom to just go, and go, and go, and never mind anyone.

I flew west: towards Wales, towards the place where I'd first been put into care, as a baby. It was some sort of a goal, anyways. And the moon was ahead of me. I’ve wondered about flying to the moon, could I bring air with me? But I don’t have magic anymore, so ditch that thought.

I landed twice, to take a piss the first time, and the second time to take a nap on top of a hayrick. I had to climb down from it to get aloft again; it just bounced when I tried to kick off from it.

As the first light began to come up behind me, I could see the coast of the Irish Sea far ahead, and I was over the shaggy valleys of Wales, looking down on scattered farms and isolated cottages.

I was thinking vaguely about the Mage's cottage, even though I didn’t want it when I could have had it. I’d been wondering if that had been a mistake; a lonely cottage in Wales would have been a good place to wear wings. But it still would have been too much like a jail cell, just one with more trees and a garden. A cell I couldn't leave without someone else spelling me to look normal. Normal.

Not even Normal. Just a failed Mage with no magic and the detritus of a failed spell stuck all over me. Too much of a coward to let someone try to do something about them – or perhaps too weak to let go of the last evidence of having been a mage, or some such lame excuse.

I was flying quite low by then, and there was a large stone walled pen opening into the field I was flying across. And there were goats down there -- several nannies, lots of kids; the bucks in their own big stone walled pen. A big old stone thatched cottage past the pen.

I turned back away from the cottage and dropped down into the wide grassy field that curled around a copse of trees, putting the copse between me and the cottage. Then I just sat there, watching the goats in the field. I had no idea what I was going to do next, but watching goats definitely improved on watching endless stupid flicks from Penny's couch.

**~~ Susan ~~**

I've been calling Lucy's boy for weeks, now. Not on a phone, of course, I don't have a number for him. I've just been calling using the way that feels the most natural to me, the way I call the goats home in the evening, with a simple little bit of an ancient spell.

For well over a year now I've been listening to the walls, in this cottage that was my little brother Davy's, where he brought Lucy, that year after he warded the cottage against all of his family, all his brothers and sisters and his grandparents. I learned of Lucy by listening to the walls.

When I am quiet enough, and I am keeping the rhythm of my spindle going; when I've lost myself in the fibers running through my fingers, no thoughts of my own, just the slender thread and turning it onto the spindle; when I'm that quiet, I start hearing the walls echoing what's been said in their hearing over the years. The stronger the emotion, the more likely I am to hear a particular thing that has been said. 

It was months of listening before I heard Davy raving over her death, which was the first I knew of her. Another week to get to where I could hear Lucy speak.

Then another two weeks before I heard the baby. I'd heard Davy raging over Lucy's death already too many times by then.

And then, a few times, far too few, Lucy telling Davy what she wanted her boy to be named. So that confirmed the connection, that Simon Snow is ours. Truly ours, not only as Davy's ward.

Simon Snow.

I've heard Davy ranting and swearing and agonizing more than I want to, far more of that than of Lucy's voice, but I have to wait through his years in the cottage, letting my spinning peace drop me back through the years of sound that has settled into these walls, back to a time when he spoke tenderly to Lucy, and she spoke from the depths of her love and admiration and trust for the man who, I believe, ultimately killed her. Not intentionally, but because he didn't ask for help caring for her. Much of their conversation has told me it was a difficult pregnancy. 

Spinning the finest yarn that I can is the fastest way to find Lucy's voice. Lace-weight.

A few times I've caught the first squalls of the boy. But it's hard to get past the explosion of Davy's grief and frustration and terror at Lucy’s death: it was a terrible blow to him that he failed to keep her alive.

So much of his ranting was about his fears that the boy would not live to be the mage he had hoped to create.

Davy was the youngest of my brothers, wild for power and worldly recognition: the rebel.

I've heard him going out to bury her many, many, many times. Too many of those times I've broken my thread, and then I lose the thread of the voices; I have to start from the present again.

~~~

My brother Bran worries that I'm living too much in their pasts, but what else is there in my life, than my family? Even when family can be this hard. For so many years, mine has been a peaceful life, goats and garden and kitchen, and sometimes a stampede of nieces and nephews comes my way, and we all play magickal games and unmagical games and cook the kitchen into an enormous, delicious mess, and then we all practice our cleaning spells and sit down to eat and laugh and be our huge family. It's my turn in this world to hold loss and pain in my heart. I'm not the first and will not be the last to do so.

We only learned of Davy's ward, Simon Snow, after Davy died. Nicodemus Petty called, mainly to tell us that Ebb had died; he was devastated. Then when Davy's cottage was put on the market, the seven of us – me and Bran and my sister Eira and her wife Yana and Haf and his wife Izara and our youngest sister Sara – we called a family meeting, and we decided we wanted to buy it, keep it in trust for Simon if he ever found us and wanted it. It conjoins our other three properties, and if Simon never wants it then at least we've kept our ancient stead intact.

I moved here with my goats from where I had been living in the little cottage west of Bran's house, and I started listening to the walls. 

Davy hadn't spoken to any of us since before he brought Lucy here – and very little before that. Back to when he got into Watford and felt too good for us countrified magickal folk who had no interest in the Coven or the school, that's when he'd started shutting us out. The rebel: there's often a rebel. Let him be, we said to each other.

I don't know what Simon's life is like now, but we've heard that he was left in care homes, and then went to Watford because Davy found him – did Davy not know where his own child was? I’ve heard nothing to tell me what he did with the baby, but clearly he didn’t raise him here. I would have heard a child living in this the cottage. I've been a listener since I was twelve, I think I would have heard a child right through the wardings that Davy put up, especially a child all alone with Davy, the raging Davy I have been listening to now for the past year. He is and is not the Davy I knew as my youngest brother.

Where Simon is now we don't know. Nicodemus doesn't answer our calls. He keeps to himself. He was devasted by Ebb’s death. We don’t know how she died, although a few rumours have come our way. But we have few connections with the folks who hold to the Coven’s ways, and none who will tell us their secrets, except – very rarely – Nicodemus.

I've never wanted my own children; I love my goats, and I keep up an active presence in entomological studies, when I'm not spending so much of my time spinning lace-weight goat yarn and listening to walls. I've listened to that little family that blew apart so suddenly – I've listened to so much in their lives that Simon is starting to feel like mine, my own little goat kid, my own particular nephew. I have plenty of nieces and nephews, but this one is a lost one and I want him back. 

Perhaps that is greedy of me; perhaps he has a fine life. But if his life is going well he may not even hear me calling; the goats come much more readily when they are hungry, or frightened. And perhaps, he’ll just get an idea that he wants to visit Wales, and he’ll come to my door curious, perhaps with his sweetheart, if he has one. I hope he does. I hope he has many people who love him. 

But if he doesn’t, and he’s lonely and needs someone: I’ve been calling, in case he needs what I want to give.

~~~

Early this morning there was a stir as something – someone? some creature with the faintest whispering touch of magic – arrived, as best as I could tell from the sky, down into the field out beyond the copse.

They're still out there, I can just pick up the sense of uncertainty and hope and distrust. I'm not sure I'm reading it off whoever it is, or whether my goats are picking up the little sounds they're making and letting me know. I was present at the birth of every single one of my goats, including their great-great-greats, in my mother’s herd. And many of their conceptions, too, so we are well entangled.

I've been spinning just inside the door of my kitchen all day, any time I’m not cooking, listening to whatever I can hear from the copse. I’m not calling any more, not the goats, not Simon. If it’s Simon and he’s unsure, I don’t want to be the least bit coercive. Whoever it is. Let them make up their own mind what they want.

My visitor stirs restlessly from time to time, then settles back into silence. I think my goats have found my visitor; I’m glad they’re out there as first welcome.

I'm planning my evening around my visitor. I have started a big, rich stew, and I've got two loaves of bread rising – I didn't start them last night, they won't be my best, but I want fresh bread as a welcome gift. If it is Simon (and if it is, how did he come down from the sky? my curiosity is giving me fits) – if it is my nephew – 

well, whoever they are, I want to make them welcome.

**~~ Simon ~~**

There's a woman living here. She’s gone over to the stone walled pen, over in the other end of the field, feeding the goats their breakfast, talking to them. Her voice is drifting to me on the little breeze across the field. She sounds nothing like Ebb and everything like Ebb, and the tears are running down my face. I haven't seen her face well enough to know what she looks like, but she has very light hair, which might be blonde, or white. It's curly and it doesn't look like she brushes it much. I can't tell how old she is, but the way she talks to her goats and the way they talk in their goat ways with her make me think I can trust her.

I hope.

I'm starving. I wasn't planning on flying all the way to Wales when I ate nothing but crisps all day yesterday. I've been sitting in the sun and shadows all day, trying to work out what I'm doing here, whether I should just fly back to London and Penny's couch, where it feels like solitary confinement with my own wretched stubborn self as my jailor.

But the goats are in the field with me. I can't leave. The last time I spent this much time with goats – no, that goes back on my list of things not to think about. The stupid list just gets longer and longer. It feels like chains. Leg irons. But I can’t stop putting things on it. 

I ought to go back to London and talk to that therapist, but I don't want to. I want to stay here with the goats. They've been grazing all day in the field I'm sitting at the edge of, and some of them have come up to me, curious. Two kids mock battling one another ran right over me, and one very small kid walked up and lay down against my leg, and stayed there for a long time in the sun. My tail curled itself around the kid. 

That’s the best thing about my tail. It’s a bellwether, I get so many feelings going at once I can’t tell which is the most important, and then sometimes my tail tells me. I think it’s telling me to stay. 

Here. With the goats.

The woman has been back in the cottage for a long time, and I'm trying to force myself to get up and go up to her door and knock. But I don’t want to leave the goats.

Every so often, on the breeze, I think I smell bread baking, and stew, beef stew.

As the sun is starting to get low, getting towards evening, she comes back out, to feed the goats. All the goats head over to their pen. After a while, she goes back into the cottage.

I sneak through the copse to get closer to the cottage. The peace of this place is getting into me, I want more of it. I want to soak in it. But it doesn’t make me less hungry.

As the sun reaches the tops of the trees beyond the cottage, she comes out of her back door carrying a big tray with two bowls on it, one big, one small, and a big loaf of bread and a small loaf.

She settles down on the bench by the table, out on the flagstones in the middle of her garden. She's got flowers growing in among her vegetables, all haphazard. I like her for it, it's a beautiful mess. But I've gotten shy again. It would be easier to cross her yard if she were in the house. Maybe. I haven't found the nerve all day, and I'm starving. I don't know why I feel so shy.

I don't even know if this is the Mage's cottage or not, but I had to land here because of all the goats. I guess I'm still looking for Ebb.

She's been eating, but now she stands up and picks up the tray again. It has the big bowl and the big loaf of bread on it, and she starts walking away from the cottage, out across the yard; heading somewhere halfway between me and the fold where the goats are munching their evening meal. She's walking through her garden, and I can't tell if she's on a path I can't see, or whether she's just wading through all her mixed up plants.

She stops walking about forty feet from me, and she says, in a quiet, clear voice: "Welcome, whoever you are; will you break bread with me? I'll go back inside soon, but I'm leaving these gifts of food for you if you would like them." 

It feels like she could almost be casting a spell, but maybe that’s just how hungry I am, and the shock of her speaking to me, that she knows someone is here. Maybe her goats told her? Let her know somehow? The goats certainly know I’m here.

She sets the tray down, goes back to the table, collects her bowl and her partly eaten loaf, and goes back into the cottage.

As soon as she has disappeared into the cottage, I'm up and getting myself well filled with her stew, and her loaf, which is absolutely the best bread I've ever tasted. It must have been what I smelled baking, earlier in the day.

Then I realize one big reason why I'm so shy: my wings are not invisible.

But I've eaten her gift, wolfed the stew down like the starved kid I'll always be. If the loaf of bread weren't so big I'd've eaten the whole of it, too.

I have to go to her door and say thank you, even if I have to turn and run after I do that. 

So I walk across her garden, carrying her tray, following the little path she followed, in the evening quiet and the gathering darkness.

When I get to the door, it's open just enough for me to peer into her kitchen, which is in a part of the cottage that looks like it got added on a few centuries ago. The rest of the cottage looks even older than the kitchen part.

I can see through the archway on the other side of the kitchen that she's lit candles in her sitting room. I can see just her hands and her knees under her long skirt, and she's spinning. It's one of those little wooden spindle things that I've seen somewhere in a museum. I've never seen anyone actually using one.

My curiosity goes right through the roof. I have to see how she does that, there's something about it that just wraps me up and draws me in.

I set the tray down on her big kitchen table and walk forward to the side of the archway, so that my wings are mostly hidden, but I can see around the end of the wall. Then my heart drops into my trainers.

She looks exactly like The Mage.

She looks up and smiles at me, going right on with her spinning, like her hands don’t need her to be thinking about what she’s doing, and smiling she looks nothing like the Mage except she’s probably about his age. But I can't smile back: I'm frozen in place.

Her smile falters – I must look like I've seen a ghost, or worse.

I want to turn and run.

I want to fall on the floor and cry.

I want her to tell me how to work that spinning thing.

My tail lashes up and around past the archway into her view and it's the only part of me that's free to move.

Her eyebrows go right up and her smile comes back, full of curiosity – and she loses her thread of concentration, the thread she's spinning breaks and her spindle hits the floor. I leap forward to try and catch it for her, saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" but she gets to the spindle first.

I wind up kneeling on the floor next to her as she’s picking up her spindle, and she says, "Was there enough stew? there's more, if you would like more."

I can't believe she isn't jumping up and running from me and my wings, the way I've just thrown myself almost into her lap.

I gulp, and make a kind of a noise, the one that always feels to me like I'm trying to say so many things at once that they all get stuck in my throat on the way out and I sound like an idiot.

The smile fades off her face, turning into something that might be concern, but it makes her look like the Mage all over again. She reaches a hand a little towards me, tilting her head, and she says, "I'm Susan, Susan Llwelyn."

That is his name, his last name. I'm not sure I even knew it until after he died. Died in front of me. At my hands, sort of. If I could make my legs work I would get up and just run away, but nothing is working, except that I want so much to see her smile again. 

Deeply, desperately, want her to smile at me again.

"I'm Simon." I choke out, and she smiles. She smiles: it's the sun coming out, making a rainbow across my sky, and I think she sees that on my face because she leans towards me, and I think I see tears starting in her eyes.

"Simon." she says, and she sounds like she's saying a whole story at once. Like I gave her something she always wanted by saying my name to her. Like she's relieved and deeply happy, like a huge tension has gone out of her. She sits up a little bit straighter, puts her hand on the cushion on the bench beside her.

"Simon. You're here. Will you sit a little with me? I've wanted so for you to come here, to sit with me a little while and tell me something of yourself."

I don't move. I'd love to sit next to her, but then I couldn't look at her face. It's the most confusing face for me to look at. Her smile is like laying out getting warmed in the sun for hours all at once, laying out in her field beyond the copse of trees. 

But it's the Mage's face too, she's so like the Mage, I'm scared, so scared I've forgotten all over again that I have wings, and when I remember them I can't believe she's not seeing them. One more thought adding to the tangle of thoughts in my head that’s so confused I can't pick just one to say out loud.

She's looking a little bemused. It’s no wonder, she's got a dragon boy kneeling next to her and all he's said is his name and he probably looks like he's got a dozen different thoughts and feelings fighting for space on his face.

Than my blasted mind-of-its-own tail comes round and slaps her on the ankle, and she says, "Is that yours? wherever did you get that?" and I start laughing like an idiot, and she starts laughing, and it's like one of us told the biggest joke ever and we can't stop laughing. I wind up with my forehead against her knee, and she's running her hand over my head and through my hair, and we're laughing.

When we finally run down, it just feels like I've known her forever, like I found a sister of Ebb's, and I point at her spindle and say, "Show me how to do that. It looks like fun."

So my first evening in Susan's home, I learn how to spin – actually I learn how to break the thread, over and over, laughing with frustration, and with joy, and with a kind of frightened new hope that I've found somewhere I can stay as long as I need to, somewhere like home.

Somewhere with goats.

She still hasn't said anything about my wings, not even after showing me up to a little room with two windows across a corner from each other, looking out over the goats in their walled home. There's a big bed and a door into a little modern bathroom with a shower stall. I'm going to be pretty cramped using that bathroom with my wings on. 

The sheets smell like her garden when I was walking through it. Sharp herbs and greens.


	2. Student Teacher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baz has it in for himself; and a student hands him his head on a platter.

**~~ Baz ~~**

Philosophy – the scholarly pursuit most akin to caterpillars circling, leader following the last in line endlessly until they die of thirst – has been a useful but not very effective antidote to losing Simon Snow.

Some weeks after he disappeared, he sent us a letter – with no return address – the letter was anonymously hand-delivered to Penny's flat, pushed under the door in the night, some time between three am when I left Penny's to go back to Fiona's, and seven in the morning when Penny was going out to get milk. The letter told us he had found an extended family of blood relatives, uncles and aunts and some fifteen cousins. He was quitting the world to live with one of the aunts and herd goats, he told us, and that although he knew this would be hard on us, he needed to put everything outside his new life on his list of things not to think about.

His wording was considerably more pithy than my account of it, but I haven't seen the letter since Penny read it to me, so I can't quote it directly. I tried to read it, but my tears blinded me. We knew before he left that something was going to have to give, he had been spending all his time on Penny's couch, silent, showing no interest in anything, not even the endless series of flicks he was watching. But we didn't expect him to simply disappear; we were horribly afraid he would turn up dead somewhere, until we got the letter.

After the letter, I started auditing philosophy classes on top of my economics course of study, and then added it as a second degree. Ultimately I took two PhD's in parallel. The topic for my philosophy dissertation was loss and change, which cost me almost no intellectual effort above what I was putting into coping with losing Simon, so I rather felt like a cheater, but it certainly impressed everyone else, including my parents.

Fiona knew better. I wrote the philosophy dissertation from her couch. Most of it started life as a long string of grief stricken rants exploring every burnt nerve ending, every regret and missed opportunity to say "I love you" to Simon, but in the editing process I replaced my observations of myself and of him with material drawn from the classics and from scholarly philosophy. After I got the PhD, I published it as my first book: A Philosophy of Loss and Change. A book which is in itself a spectacle of loss, of absence: Simon's name, Simon's face, Simon's depth and breadth and warmth and huge humanity, having been ruthlessly edited out of it, despite being its actual motivating force.

It has been a number of years – 7 years, 3 months and 13 days, not that anyone's counting – since he disappeared, and I like to think I'm over him. Fiona thinks differently but I don't listen to her. She's long since given up trying to find dates for me; in the first couple years, I went on a few, under duress, and was such a sarcastic prick to them that I cost her a couple of friends, at least for a few weeks.

I'm not sure, at this point, whether I would do that again – being the sarcastic prick – I rather got handed my own head on a platter, by one of my students in the first philosophy course that I taught, two years ago.

He was a boy who had grown up in care, and every single one of his essays, no matter the assigned topic, he introduced with a blistering short passage detailing the hurt and despair he had felt at the hands of other boys in care who had behaved towards him much the same as I had treated Simon.

This was the first one, at the top of the first essay he turned in:

_It will never leave me: the deadening shock of fear when one of the bullies  
would come into our dorm room at the end of the day, and fire up his sneer,  
like it was the best part of his day to pick out one of us. He would stand there  
leaning against the door, never even touch the lucky one, never raise his voice,  
just say a long string of things to cut that one poor sod down to gravel.  
Pulverize him. From knowing things that the other boy cared about,  
how to slash him the cruelest._

_While the rest of us listened and were very, very glad it wasn't our turn, and  
felt like cowardly creeps for not having the guts to defend the poor sod who was  
where each of us had been or were going to be, some other evening._

_It's hard to sleep in the same room with someone who does that.  
For three years of my life._

It took me until a few hours before I had to return the graded essays to my class, to read the rest of his essay. 

I fought seeing myself in the bully until I was almost out of time, but I had to get past that to get through the essay to mark it. I don't remember anything of the rest of his essay. I do remember that I gave him high marks, and that his essay deserved the high marks.

And I copied out that passage. Kept it. Held it up against my memories of Watford and asked myself, how close is this to Simon's experience of me? How can I measure that, without having him here to ask?

At that point it was five years since Simon had left, when that passage came crashing through my life, and it tore open all the wounds I had cobbled closed and which I had thought were healing.

Each of that student's essays arrived on my desk with a new, succinctly told passage of hurt. Each one took me down another peg. I wrote out a copy of each; each passage added to my questions of how Simon had felt, when I laid into him with my contempt and sarcasm.

It seemed to me that my student, having gotten something burning out of him into words, was then free to write his consistently brilliant essays. The difference with me was that I had edited out the personal experience before turning in my dissertation.

The seventh essay, my student told of turning to bullying other boys, himself. He said that, having taken that level of power and control into his own hands, he became able to sleep all night: not because he felt good about himself, but because he was no longer in fear.

Two days after I gave back that essay, he showed up for one of my office hours, the early morning hour that almost no one ever came to.

By then, I had taken out every book on bullying in the library, had them stacked on my desk. They had not been very useful. The literature on bullying is written from the "good guys" perspective: virtuous defenders against those bad bullies: classic dichotomy.

Us against them, the evil them.

I'm not being fair. The wealth of observation and commentary in the literature on bullying is extensive, valuable, immensely worthy. It's the perspective I'm criticizing. My perspective has been violently shifted recently. What bully writes from the perspective of how it is to be a bully? Not me, you can be sure.

Only now I have this student, and he's telling me in his essay that he's coming from that perspective, and I've been torn apart, and I'm sitting here in my fledgling professor's desk chair writing nothing because I can't imagine tearing off my mask to let anyone see that deeply into me.

__

I'm hearing someone in the hall, somewhere beyond the line of sight through my open door. They're actually very quiet, but I've got that extra advantage – another privilege, or curse – of vampiric hearing.

__

After about a quarter of an hour of hesitation, my student walks in and sits on one of my visitor chairs, which are identical to my own standard issue desk chair. I didn't kit my office out with Pitch residence furniture, I kept it standard junior faculty issue. My clothes give me away enough as it is.

__

My desk faces the window: I don't want to confront people from across a fortress of professorial privilege, I want something more like a meeting of equals, of peers, when I speak with visitors.

__

He's got his latest essay in his hands, all over green ink comments in my hand.

"You don't say anything about my introductory digressions," he blurts out.

I’ve been at a loss for something to say about those terrifying passages, that's why.

I grope for something to say; finally as the silence stretches, I simply admit it: "I'm at a loss for what to say. It's not that – that I don't read them, or want to ignore them, but." I run out.

Now I am finding out that there are a thousand things I could say, and I want very badly to say none of them. He is far, far braver than I am.

The silence continues to stretch out. Finally, I find a single thing that I might be able to say, groping for an opening in my own experience.

"When I started writing for my dissertation, the only things I could write about were so. Searingly. Personal, that they were never going to make it into the final text, but they were what I had to write, to. To get anything written at all.”

This is impossibly hard. He's looking up at me, kind of sideways, like it's as hard for him.

I try another way of putting it. "I've been thinking a lot about what you're doing. I don't think I have the guts to tell you how much what you write is my own experience, I'm supposed to be the teacher here, but."

I'm stuck again. I’ve said something I desperately didn’t want to say, especially to a student. I think I'd rather – much rather – be battling a chimera. Or the Mage. Simon would be there by my side, even if we still hated each other. I can't go there.

I can't even look at my student any more.

He says, "I can't write anything – at least, not anything on the kind of topics you give us – unless I start with that crap. And I have to know that I will leave it in, in order to get anything else written. It's a promise I have to make to myself. And know that I will keep."

Another long silence.

He says, "I have to tell. I have to tell on them, and I have to tell on myself, because I went over to their side and became one of them. And I don't want to do that ever again. So I have to write about it."

This is exactly what I have been thinking for the last two days. For weeks, now. I've read and been frustrated by the one-sided perspective in the literature, but I've actually only been able to formulate the thought explicitly since this boy who is not that much younger than me took off his mask and said to me at the top of his assigned topic essay, "I am also one of them. The bad guys." Not the romantic bad guys: the bad guys no one romanticizes.

He says, "You don't say anything in your book about your personal experience, except that one reference to your mother in the Prefatory Notes."

"No. I edited everything out." I had been hoping to edit it all out of me, too, but it all just stayed with me. As if editing it out of the dissertation edited it back into me all the more indelibly.

He's looking at the floor, his essay drooping from one hand. He gives me that sideways look again. "Maybe I need to learn to do something like that." There's something defeated in his tone.

"Write two versions. Write one for me, with everything in it, and then write the one for everyone else."

He looks at his essay, and slowly, slowly, shakes his head. "I don't think that's my. Way."

Then he looks up at me, jutting his chin, something like fury in his eyes. I drop my eyes, ashamed. I've just told him to hide, and he's not going to take my way out. Brave man.

"Ok, no, I was wrong." I sit up and sweep my arm across my desk, scattering the pile of books on bullying across my desk, knocking over my thermos. It crashes to the floor beyond the end of my desk. "I've been reading. I've been reading up on the topic, and I think you are absolutely right. But."

I look back at him, and I'm relieved that he's lost the look of fury: his face is still, and open.

I say, "Learn to do it both ways. With, and without, the personal details."

He looks down at his essay, and thinks about it. "To give myself the choice."

"If you want to – and I think you do – if you want to contribute, you'll need to have that level of choice."

I look up at the ceiling. "To make the case that you are respectable and worthy. Indelibly. Then bring in the other perspective, when they can't just shoot you down for being the other. The evil other. And probably not – at least, not at first – as taken from your own experience."

He's sitting back against the back of his chair, and he's looking up over my head. "I think I know what you mean, maybe."

"You've got a special assignment, ok? go write what you think I mean, but make it your own and tell me what you mean. As hard as you can. Make it your own. Don't follow in my footsteps too closely, I'm."

I take a deep breath. I think actually I'm saying this to Simon, who broke out of the trap.

"not nearly as brave as you are."


	3. The Box of Letters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Giving Baz a bit of surcease.

**~~ Baz ~~**

I have a box in which I keep the letters from people who have read my book on loss and change. Some of the letters are simple thank you notes, others are long, pages and pages laced with heartbreak; some are full of hope and strength, some are gushing twaddle; every so often I get a letter from someone who feels my book has saved their life. 

It wasn't meant to be some kind of self help book, it was written and edited – slashed to the bone – with the intention of making it just one more dry as dust doctoral thesis, but I suppose the depth of my grief and my need for some sort of transformation out of that grief and loss – evidently much of that found its way into the book.

The box of letters fills part of the hole in my life, the hole where Simon once was.


	4. Spindle and Axe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Susan worries whether she should have called Simon to her, and Simon watches blisters heal.

**~~ Susan ~~**

I wake early, while it’s still dark. I have a lot of thinking to do.

I’m questioning whether it was right for me have called Simon here. It seemed the right thing to do when I started: I had been listening to Davy rave and plan his grandiose plans for so long, and especially his rants about the boy Simon, about his magic being broken. I felt so badly for Simon, that he should have had to deal with Davy trying to fix him. Davy didn’t have the right to do anything like that.

I can’t imagine how Davy could have been anything but destructive, in Simon’s life.

So I wanted to offer him something gentler. Be an aunt with no attitude about how he ought to be, what choices he ought to make, what kind of accomplishments he should be achieving.

But maybe I’m doing something similar: charting a path that suits me, for this young man I know nothing about, other than the simple fact of his relationship with Davy.

He must have friends in his life – he’s not some isolated outcast, he reaches out like he expects me to reach back, even when he’s unsure. That must be something he’s had in the past, and plenty of, to be as confident as he is that I will respond to him.

How far did he come here, flying? From a few farms over? From half way round the world? He was at Watford, he probably hasn’t gone far since then, but… I just don’t know enough.

Do I even know he flew here? That first morning, I had the impression of someone coming down from the sky, but I need to remind myself that was an impression. I did not actually see him in flight.

Well, one of the things about today’s world is he must have a phone, they all do these days. So he has that much independence. And perhaps he’s on vacation. Or between jobs. Or, well, just visiting.

Oh, dear. I think I’m hoping he’ll stay for a long time. That’s absurd.

I feel like I’ve missed him for a long time. Or like I was waiting for him to – I’m being silly.

He was so eager for me to teach him spinning. And he spent all that first day sitting with the goats, out in the field.

I wonder if he picks up on the magic that spinning is for me.

He must have magic, but he doesn’t seem to use it. He went to Watford, surely he must have learned to use it there. Most magickal folk I know use it casually, habitually, whenever they feel it’s safe to. And anyone magickal would feel all the magic that is woven into the stones of this place.

But trying to figure him out is not what I should be doing right now. It’s for him to tell me about himself, in his own time, on his own terms.

It’s for me to figure out what I’ve done here, and what my responsibility is. But I can’t do that until I understand him better.

Which is tantamount to saying, there is actually nothing for me to think about, because I’m going to follow his lead and listen.

I wonder if he’s attracted to spinning because of the listening? He must wonder who his parents were. I could tell him, but am I as sure of that as I think I am? And Bran is following his own track down that path, digging through old papers and searching the internet for anything he can find, which probably isn't much; I don’t know what he’s turned up. Bran and I said we weren’t going to share anything until we have to, so we don’t influence each other. So I hesitate.

Enough thinking. I’ll get dressed and feed the goats. And start breakfast. He’s a hungry one, if the goats don’t rouse him a good, smelly breakfast will.

~~~

But then when I step out the kitchen door there he is over by the pen, leaning over the gate, and the goats are greeting him. I join him and lean over the gate with him.

We get their breakfast from the stone shed and go into the pen. He sits on the edge of the floor of their big wooden three sided sleeping shed and holds a pan of grain on his lap and gets inundated by goats. I step into the melee and sort them, saying their names as I go, making sure all get some and none get too much. Simon looks blazingly happy.

I don’t have any doubt, now, that I did right by him to call him here.

**~~ Simon ~~**

I’m getting my hair and my ears and my fingers and my trackies and my wings nibbled, by the goats who can’t fit their faces into the big pan. Susan wades through them, saying their names, making sure each one gets their share to eat. She says mostly they graze, or eat hay from their manger, but it’s good for them to get some grain too.

She tells me all their names as she sorts through them, but all I remember is Helios. That’s the little goat who lay next to me all yesterday. He’s the color of the sunlight on fallen beech leaves.

After feeding the goats, we get a wide flat basket from the kitchen, and go picking fresh things from the garden. Early sweet peppers, long thin tender purple velvety bean pods, parsley, spring onions, summer savory, thyme. In the kitchen, we cook them into about a dozen eggs in a big cast iron pan. She has a proper refrigerator, but she doesn’t keep the eggs in it. She does have plenty of butter in it.

Her stove is a small, modern gas stove. She has a big cast iron rack hanging from the ceiling, with some pots and pans and steel bowls and big spoons and lots of utensils and gadgets hanging on it, and lots of dried plants.

We sit at the table in the middle of the garden to eat. She picks orange and yellow and red flowers to put on her eggs, and offers me some. They turn out to have a sharp spicy flavor. Nasturtiums. I’ve seen them before in people’s gardens. I didn’t know you could eat them.

I slice fat slices of butter like slabs of cheese, eat it on bread from the last of the loaf she gave me yesterday.

While we’re washing up the breakfast things I ask if we can spin some more, and she says, “Would you like your own spindle?” and I say “May I?” and I wonder if I should offer to pay for it or what, but I definitely don’t have any money on me. 

She says, “Oh, of course. I have a lot, they’re easy to make and I’m always trying out new ones. There are all kinds from around the world.” She pulls out a box with a bunch of spindles, all different. 

I say, “I never even saw anyone using one before you. How did you learn?”

“Ah, breaking the thread and dropping it a thousand times, just like you last night!”

“But did someone teach you? Or did you figure it out for yourself?”

“Oh, no, my mother showed me. That’s what she always said, that she broke the thread and dropped her spindle a thousand times to get good at it. I drove my brother Bran wild dropping the spindle on the floor. He’s not one for a lot of noise. He likes it quiet.”

I pick a spindle from her wooden box that has a fat river stone on it and a plain hardwood rod through it. She says that’ll make a thick, warm yarn for sweaters and hats and socks, which sounds about right to me. It looks like I could throw it on the floor all day long and never break it. Some of the fancier ones – tapered rods, thin, carved stone discs – she calls them whorls – look like they would break in my hands.

We sit out at her table in the middle of the garden. She shows me how to draft a leader, and how to make a half-hitch around my thumb and drop it over the top of the spindle, and spin a twist into the leader, and how to draft new fibres out of the roving and let the twist run up into the fibres.

There is nothing else in the world but the smile in her voice and the softness of the fibre. Even when I break the thread and drop my spindle and she smiles and watches me struggle to fix the break and keep going. Even though she’s so good at it and just keeps spinning her amazingly fine yarn, never stopping, and I’m terrible at it and break mine all the time. She said before that it took her a thousand breaks to get good, and I can definitely do that. ‘Specially if she keeps smiling at me.

~~~

After lunch, I want to do something else besides sit, and I ask if there’s anything energetic we could do. She thinks about it, then walks me over to a shed with a lot of tools neatly stored in it, and asks me what looks like something I’d like to work with.

There’s a couple of axes in there, a big one and a smaller one, with oiled leather covers over their heads. I pick up the big one, heft it, find the balance point to carry it at, along the handle near the head. It’s heavier than the Sword of the Mages. Chopping wood would be plenty energetic.

She smiles like she thinks that would be fun too, and takes the smaller axe, and an oily cloth bag that clinks when she lifts it. We walk out across her garden, out into the field where the goats are grazing.

They come up to us and nibble on our hands and clothes. One of the little ones climbs up Susan and gets a hoof trapped in a fold of her skirt, tears a hole. Susan disentangles the hoof, strokes the kid’s forehead which seems to quiet it, and the goats lose interest in us and drift back to their grazing. Susan strokes the hole in her skirt, back and forth across it, saying something in a language I don’t know. It starts to mend itself, slowly. 

I feel like she is definitely not watching me to see what I think of this. I can see the little threads finding each other; if I was close enough I’ll bet I could see the little fibres getting twisted into each other like there’s invisible fingers twirling them together; so I go down on my knees for a closer look and I say, “That’s like spinning, isn’t it, except not touching it.”

She makes a laughing sound that’s got more in it than just amusement. “Indeed,” she says, and then she just leaves it at that.

I guess wings are just one more thing in her day.

We walk through the trees east of her big field to a smaller field at the edge of a large woods, where there is a wide wooden chopped up floor in the middle, like a lot of chunks of wood got pounded into the ground endwise and they’ve been getting chopped on for a long time. There is a big pile of dead trees at one end of the clearing, and a smaller pile of logs of all different sizes, sawn into more or less two foot lengths.

**~~ Susan ~~**

On the way across the field where the goats are grazing, he asks about there being no fencing to keep the goats out of the garden.

I tell him about the warding I like to use, the “lost interest” spell. I tell him how, for instance, if he had come onto my stead as an uninvited guest, he would have lost interest in coming any further, that whatever in him that might naturally have lead him to go somewhere else, that’s what the spell would have touched, to send him on his way. But family is always invited. 

Davy had put up much stronger wardings, excluding even his family, but they fell when he died. I don’t tell him that part.

I sit down with him on the edge of my chopping floor and I show him how to clean and sharpen the axe, with the file and stone and abrasive cloth from my bag. And how to use the leather strop to clean off burring that’s left on the edge after honing it with the stone.

Then I kirtle up my skirt to keep it out of trouble, take up my favorite axe and show him how to do it, slicing the edges off a chunk that’s sitting on my chopping floor.

One hand at the far end of the haft, other hand sliding up to control the head as I lift the ax straight up to the top of the stroke, then as I bring it down accelerating towards my workpiece I slide my upper hand down the haft and bend my knees, to end in a half squat, haft nearly parallel to the ground, the full width of the sharp edge buried in the chopping floor.

I explain how that stroke is the safest way to chop: the head of the axe, the sharp edge of it, is never moving towards me; always away from me or straight down into the wood, or the chopping floor, at the end of the stroke when it’s moving the fastest. It’s something my mother taught me. Not everyone does the full squat, but I like it. I don’t have to bother with a chopping block, and I feel like my feet are safer.

It gives your legs quite the workout. Which is what he was looking for.

I pick up a hefty stick for him to experiment with, and he mock chops next to me as I slice more kindling off the edges of my chunk.

Once he has the squat down – he can dispense with it later if he wants – but he’s my student right now – once he looks like he’s safe with it, I give him my small axe to experiment with. It’s too small for him, he’s not much taller than I am but he’s considerably broader, and my weight is centered in my hips, where his weight is centered up towards his shoulders. 

It’s not that I don’t sometimes use the large ax for especially stubborn pieces of wood, but I like the easy precision of the smaller axe. And I have a splitting maul and wedges, which are safer than an axe that feels a little too big for me.

After a while I give him the big axe, and pick out a number of sawn sections of big branches that look like they’ll split without too much trouble. Leave the knotty troublemakers for another day. He goes at them with a big grin.

It was Davy’s axe.

I don’t think this is the time to tell him that; I’m not sure what he would make of it.

Anyhow: he picked it out, himself; I think it’s his now. It would have been his if he had accepted the property when it was his to take.

**~~ Simon ~~**

Blisters. 

I’ve been chopping with the big axe for about an hour, learning to split logs down the middle, because I do not have the aim (yet) to go for slices like Susan can, and Susan chopped with me for a while, and then she sat down on the grass cross-legged, a little behind me, and watched, with her smile that makes me feel I’m doing everything right even when I’m just barely learning the first steps. It feels great, to swing my arms up and bring the axe down to smash into the wood and – sometimes – usually – the wood falls apart in two neat pieces.

I didn’t feel the blisters until I stopped for a rest. My hands are running with fluid. She gets up and looks at them with me, holding my hands in hers. My sliding hand is a mess, and it’s starting to hurt like blazes.

She asks, “Would you like me to do something about that for you?” and I nod.

She says something in that other language, waving one hand across and back over my hands, and then we watch my blisters heal up, slowly. It’s like the broken edges of my skin are creeping back together, I suppose it’s slow because I’m watching it, but in reality it’s fast because of the spell.

I think about the fibres in the hole in her skirt spinning themselves back together, and I think that if I had eyes like a microscope I would see the cells in my hands spinning themselves back together.


	5. Green Ink, Red Ink, Zeroth Draft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Baz cogitates upon his teaching style.

**~~ Baz ~~**

One of my tutors before I went to Watford, a Greek woman, used to say to me that her job was to take me by the scruff of my neck and the seat of my pants and toss me up over her head. 

She liked to sit curled up in the window seat looking mournfully out at the grounds of the Hampshire house, or in Fiona’s window watching London go by, firing hellish questions and challenges at me. She made me look things up, or figure them out for myself with a minimum of prompting and explanation. Stretch your head out as wide as it will go, she would say. Wider.

She marked up everything I wrote for her in green and red ink. Green for what she wanted more of, red for what I needed to get better at. Long, detailed green comments telling me exactly what she liked; short, sharp red comments referring me to reference books and texts where I could go figure out what I needed to improve. 

Look up this term and apply it, she would write in red. Read this article and apply it to this passage. Review your grammar and fix this sentence. Good use of metaphor, in green. A zeugma! in green. Then, in red, Go look up zeugma.

Angling down the margin, green ink in a cramped, squared-off cursive, a small dissertation on what she liked about the organization of my argument. Then in red: Your last sentence is weak. Try again.

It developed, over the years, into rather a competition between us: me trying to expunge from my work anything that might call down a red ink comment, her trying to find some legitimate quibble whereby she could mark me down. Once she resorted to claiming I had exceeded her secret time limit by a minute. 

My retaliation was to hand her my next effort so deluged with mispellings, deliberately fractured grammar, and patent untruths and distortions that all she could do was laugh and throw it back at me. “Try again, little man.”

Every so often she got out a blue pen to underline something she hadn’t known, something I’d taught her. 

I lived for those blue lines. 

The last time I saw her was about a month before I left for Watford. I was so excited to go to Watford, I didn’t realize she would not be there again. Then the intensity of Watford drove her out of my mind altogether.

I have no idea where she went after tutoring me. I also have no idea what her name was, and no idea why I can’t remember it. It might be as simple as the fact that she never asked me to use it, but I am ashamed of having no memory of it, because she is the teacher I most want to be like.

So I mark essays with green and red ink. Almost like her. The blue lines are too hard.

**~~~**

At the beginning of the first class of term, in both economics and philosophy, I talk to my students about writing a zeroth draft: the draft that no one other than themselves will ever see, but which gets their thoughts out on to the paper. A starting point.

Next I talk about audience, and how we shift our writing depending on our perceived audience.

Then I tell them they will have fifteen minutes to write two short essays in class, on why they are taking this class: the first written for the reader they perceive me to be, the second as a private essay that no one but the author will read. That gets me a fair number of panicky looks.

I tell them I don't care how long or short or ungrammatical or mispelled the essays are; these are zeroth draft essays that they will take with them and I will never see. The goal is to get enough words onto paper to create that starting point, to get the thinking started.

Then I time them: 7.5 minutes for the first essay, 7.5 minutes for the second essay.

Occasionally someone chokes under the time pressure, writes nothing or nearly nothing. I make a mental note of those students. They’re my waifs.

When the time is up, I tell them that if that was hard, to get a copy of a book called _Writing Your Dissertation In Fifteen Minutes a Day_, which is where I got the zeroth draft idea from. And I make a special point of saying that the book has useful antidotes for not being able to get words on paper. The look of relief, gratitude sometimes, on the faces of students who found the 7.5 minute time limit daunting: that’s one of the best moments for me.

For the next twenty minutes, I ask them to comment on differences in their writing between the two essays, in the context of audience.

There are those who speak up easily and need to be squashed if they're not to take up all the discussion time; there are those who need some needling to get them talking. But I direct my most evocative questions at the ones who don't want to say anything. I shush others who start to jump in. I want to give the quiet ones a chance to survive a moment in the spotlight.

It's my own personal goal to get the quietest ones to speak up, nudge them into expressing their disagreements and their own particular perspectives.

It's something I started doing as part of class discussions in my undergraduate years, siding with and supporting the quietest voices that spoke up at all. It wasn't until I got into my graduate coursework that I started to see it as a completely inefficient and roundabout way of making amends to Snow for cutting him off when he couldn't find words.

I can't get it out of my head how volubly he always could speak to Bunce, all thoughout those years at Watford. A substantial portion of his difficulties with getting words out wasn’t him at all. It was me, and people like me, standing on his tongue and taunting him.

So: for the last 10 minutes of class, I tell my students that 95% of them are procrastinators (actually, it's probably only about 75%, but I'd rather they felt like they're all in the same boat with their classmates), and that’s unfortunate, because even the best written first draft is a poor shadow of what it would be with a couple days and some editing under its belt. 

“Write zeroth drafts on what interests you the most as you read the assigned readings. If you focus on and write about what you are most interested in, giving yourself some time to re-read your own work and edit it, you will learn the most you possibly can, even if your essays are not as long as, for instance, those of you who can write seventeen pages off the top of their heads on their laptop in the hall half an hour before class.” Which gets a good laugh. And some red faces.

“And, because class is ending and we haven’t done a lick of work on the actual topic, you’ll be writing an essay to turn in at the start of our next class, on the reading for this class which I’m sure you’ve done already.” That’s a long assumption, it depends on them having actually downloaded my syllabus and read enough of it to know what’s expected of them. 

“The topic of the essay you will turn in, is what topics in the reading you find the most interesting, personally, and why. Be specific; feel free to refer to any other reading that you may have done previously; convince me that you are passionately interested in a subset of the topics we’ll be covering, even if you aren’t. I’ll underscore that: you get to lie to me about your interests, if you want to.”

Big laugh. I’ve got their attention. 

“I don’t want regurgitation of what you’ve read; I want to know what piques your curiosity, what gets your imagination fired up, what topics are your burning interests. Convince me that you are interested in some part of the material detailed in the syllabus for this course.” 

And download it and read it if you haven't already, you bunch of numpties. You can figure out for yourselves where it is, or ask a classmate. Or me, but I know it's easy to find, so I will scoff (in my most respectably stuffed shirt professorial tone) at you before reminding you it's on the website for this class.

If I can entice work out of them that shows me I’ve had some success at tossing my students up over my head, I get to write lots of comments in green ink. That's where the fun is for me.


	6. The Comfort of Goats

**~~ Simon ~~**

The Mage is dragging me around Watford. He's furious with me. Everyone is dead. Everywhere we go, there's someone or something dead. A dead dragon on the Lawn. All the dryads dead in the wood. We're not walking from place to place, we just go – first we're standing in the Wavering Wood, then we're standing in the library, with dead students lying on the tables and falling out of the chairs.

Penny is dead on a dining hall table. I know it's her because her hair is every color I ever saw it. She’s holding a book in both hands over her chest like a maiden on a marble tomb holding a rose. Only I know she’s faking it. I know it in that way you just know things.

As the Mage drags me past her I think, "She's not dead. She's faking it." but I am afraid the Mage will notice so I stop thinking that, and then we're in the Catacombs.

Baz is dead on the floor, but he's not a pile of ashes, he's just dead, and his mother is dead next to him and she's holding him, he's all curled up like a little kid with her arms around him. I can't see his mother's face but I know it's her.

I want to feel like they are faking it too. I know I’m wrong, they’re not faking it.

I feel like I am suffocating. I feel like I'm about to go off. The Mage drags me past.

We're in the kitchen and all the cooks are dead. They're dead, and they’re in the pots, which are huge, and in the freezer they’re in the boxes with the potatoes and frozen fish which are huge too. The kitchen is huge, it goes on and on, and there are kitchen people dead and stuffed into everything like they're going to get cooked if there were anyone left to cook.

The Mage is screaming at me. I can't hear him, but I know what he is saying: he is saying I did this.

He is screaming, "You fucked everything up! This is all your fault! I keep fixing you and you keep breaking it!"

I start shouting back at him.

I wake up.

I'm in my bed in Susan's cottage and it's dark, and I've thrown all the covers on the floor and I'm hot and sweaty and cold all at the same time.

I wonder if I've been shouting. 

I hope Susan doesn’t wake up and come in.

I don't want anyone else's theories about my dreams, they just get me all confused.

And dreams are just stupid. They’re just all sorts of stuff jumbled together, like a messy room with all your stuff thrown on the floor and there's no sense in what's next to what, you just have to clean it up. 

But I can’t just ignore the jumbled up stuff either. I keep tripping over it. That's the hard part, how do I clean this up?

I get up and take a long shower, and get dressed – if I stay at Susan's any longer I have to do something about my clothes – and I go down quietly through this peaceful place, through her kitchen where there is butter in the refrigerator and loaves of bread rising under tea towels. I can smell it working.

I go out and sit on her table. I don't want to stir up the goats yet.

I'm wondering if this really is the Mage's cottage. It's so peaceful, I can't believe anything so peaceful could have been his.

But if I imagine the peace gone from it – like the smile gone from Susan's face and then it looks like the Mage's face – without the mustache – that ridiculous mustache, like a little kid's idea of a headmaster's mustache – 

If this place didn't have Susan's smile on it, but the Mage's mustache – 

I'm thinking like a little kid, but it makes sense, because I'm not all that awake yet.

If this place didn't have Susan's smile all over it for me, but instead the Mage's face trying to fix me – 

I don’t want it to have been the Mage’s place. I desperately do not want it to have been his place. I want it to have been Susan’s forever.

I need to learn all the goats' names so I can feed them and keep track of them so they all get a share and none get too much. Too much makes them sick, Susan said, you have to be careful, but knowing their names makes it easier to keep track of who has eaten and who has not.

They’re not milking goats, like Ebb’s; they’re fibre goats, mohair fibre. And they have their horns, because horns help them stay cool; they can get heat stroke if they don’t have them, because their coats are so warm. And you don’t shear them, you comb the underhair off them. I want to learn everything about them. I am quite, quite sure the Mage didn’t keep goats.

I look up at the cottage, at the big old trees on the hill beyond, west of the cottage.

The leaves at the very tops are just starting to show how the east is turning towards the sun, just starting to get a little bit of the red from the sun that's probably already up on Denmark across the sea.

If I had taken the cottage when it was mine to take, would I have met Susan? would there have been goats?

**~~ Susan ~~**

I wake up in the dark to Simon shouting.

I'm about to run down the hall, but I stop before I open my door.

I have no idea if he would want me to intrude. None at all.

He has told me almost nothing about his life before he came here.

I slide down my door and sit against it, wrapping my arms around my knees and my feet in the long hem of my nightshirt.

If I go, I can't take it back that I intruded.

If I don't go, I can't take it back that I didn't go.

I may feel like he's my family so of course I would not be intruding, but I don't know if he would feel that way.

I should just stop thinking and let my feet tell me what to do.

I am really bad at not thinking.

Well, except when it's me and Bran out in the world doing forensics. Out somewhere heartbroken where too many people died and too many people lied about having killed people and there's overlapping mismatching data and the challenge is to count each one who died, just once, and not count two people as one. When we've out working on a project like that, not thinking is the only way to keep going. We don't do that too often. It's so hard. It's never just us, there's other people, no one else with magic as far as we know, and since what I can hear in all the little echoes from the remains isn't admissible evidence, Bran takes what I hear and tries to find admissible evidence from knowing what to look for.

It takes a long time to find one’s way all the way back after that kind of thing, even in this peaceful place. The goats are an important part of that.

Simon has stopped shouting.

Is he ok? Is it any of my business?

If he comes down the hall and knocks on my door – 

I leap back into bed and pull the covers up. I don’t want him to know I’ve heard him if he would rather I didn’t. But I want him to know I heard him and cared. I’m just all to pieces with doubt.

I hear the pipes running with water. The pipes are pretty well silenced, but not so completely that I can't hear them.

He's taking a shower, I think.

That's good. I'll let him look after himself, but I think I want to ask if he would have liked me to come in to wake him.

**~~ Simon ~~**

Susan opens the kitchen door and leans on the door frame. She says, “Good morning…” 

I feel like there’s a question in that, so I say, “I hope I didn’t wake you. I think I was shouting.”

“I heard a little bit, but I wasn’t sure if you’d want me…”

“Yeah, I’d rather work out for myself. I get all confused if someone’s talking at me.”

She smiles, and leans her head back against the wood of the door frame. She’s just wearing ordinary leggings today, and a big baggy shirt. She looks less like someone out of medieval times, more like a London mom out picking up groceries.

The sun has come up, the light is all sideways across the fields and the garden and on the stone walls of the cottage. There are a lot of little clouds in the sky, a soft repeating pattern like fish scales.

She goes in after a bit and I can hear her puttering around in the kitchen.

~~~

After we feed the goats, after we eat breakfast and clean up, we get out our spinning and sit on the table.

I’m stiff all over and my hands aren’t working very well.

“Me too,” she says. “That was more chopping than I usually do.”

“Me too.”

“I’m going to stretch out. I should have done that last night, I’m too old to get away with not stretching.” She walks out to the grass beyond the garden.

I’m watching her stretch. Some of the footballers at Watford had a whole regime of that, but I never seemed to need it before. Well, maybe I’m getting old too, so I go and copy her, and she talks about anatomy and how muscles work. Some of the stretches are too uncomfortable with my wings in the way, and she shows me different ones that stretch the same muscles. I’m a lot less stiff when we’re done. 

We’re inside the goats’ warded grazing, so of course they come over and get involved. I keep having to push Helios off me.

**~~ Susan ~~**

After stretching, we lie out in the sun with the goats grazing around us, me on my back, him on his stomach with his wings folded. I will die of curiosity if he doesn’t tell me about those wings soon. Oh well. Wait for it, Susan, wait for it.

Helios climbs up on one of his wings, and he gently unfolds the wing out from under, spilling the kid onto his back. He folds his wings around the kid, who settles down for a bit, until he gets hungry and goes off to find his mother.

“This house. Have you lived here a long time?” asks Simon.

“About a year.”

He’s silent for a long while. It’s warm in the sun. I let it fall through me.

“Who used to live here?”

“My youngest brother, David Llwelyn.”

He turns his head away from me, and his wings fold up tight and his tail lashes for a moment, then stills.

“Was he at Watford? As headmaster?”

“Yes.”

He’s silent a long time. His wings slowly relax, slide down to the ground. His tail winds itself around his leg.

“I dreamed about him last night.”

Goats drift towards us, munching. I sigh a little, turn over in the sun to wave my hand and spell them “lost interest.”

“I dreamed that he blamed it all on me.”

He sits up, wings reaching out and sweeping across me, then he gets up and strides through my garden, down the little path to the table, where he climbs up and leaps off and he’s flying.

He’s soaring up until I can hardly see him. The goats flee into their pen, hide under their roof.

He drops down out of the sky, wings half folded, like a falcon stooping, puts out his wings and pulls up over the field in a wide loop.

He flies between me and the sun, his shadow crossing me, but it’s too bright to look and see what he looks like against the sun. Then he’s stooping down over the roof of the cottage like a falcon sighting his prey, and he looks like he’s going to crash into the trees beyond but he makes a hard turn and lands at a run, down the wide path between the hot frames and the compost heap, north of the cottage.

My heart is pounding. He flies. I am as jealous as a ten year old. I hope none of the youngsters up at the farms saw him, we’ll never hear the end of it. Half of them will want rides and the other half will be trying to figure out how to spell wings onto themselves.

He comes back and sits down in the grass with me.

“I cannot stand to think about that guy. I’m sorry to say that about your brother.” He tears up a handful of grass and looks at it. “He was really hard on me and a lot of other people.” 

“I know.”

“Do you? How much do you know about him?”

“Not a lot. I expect you know a great deal more than I do.”

“Yes,” he says fiercely, “I wish I didn’t.”

He starts tearing the grass to little bits. He says, “I don’t want to talk about him right now.”

I say, “Ok.”

He looks sideways at me. “People are always telling me I have to talk about it.”

“I’d say you’re best off doing whatever you feel like you need to do with it.”

“But I don’t know what to do with it!” He throws his handful of torn up grass into the wind and the little bits blow back over us. 

“I want it to go away, but then I dream about it, and I end up just sitting around doing nothing because if I try to do anything I get destroyed by stuff I can’t stand to remember and then I have to just do something stupid like watch flicks all day to make it go away enough, and I hate it. I hate just sitting like a numpty on the couch because I can’t do anything because doing anything stirs it all up again.”

“Hmmmm…” I say. “So: there’s lots of things to do with hard stuff like that. Talking about it is only one thing, and, well, that’s not usually my choice anyways.”

“What do you do? What kinds of things are hard for you?” Two more big handfuls of grass.

Ok. My turn to open up. “The hardest for me has been when me and another of my brothers, Bran, when we go do forensics for human rights violations, like where thousands of people have died.”

He looks at me, hands dropping. “Wow.” He looks back down at his pile of grass. “My dream last night was a lot of people dead all over Watford.” 

He gets up again and walks out into the field and turns to walk back towards me, and some of the goats follow him a little ways before I wave them back. This is not the time for nibbling attacks.

“What’s the best for getting rid of it?” he asks, standing still, facing me.

“Well, I don’t know. Best. Well, for me it’s always a lot of different things. Spinning and goats and walking and thinking about it in little bits and thinking about other things so it’s not my whole life, and sometimes me and Bran talk, and sometimes I dream too, especially if we did some of the work at the graves. It takes time. It’s not like one tear in the cloth of me that I can mend and be done with. It’s like many holes torn, sometimes it’s like being shredded and having to pull in new threads to take place of what is just torn out and gone.” I pull my own handful of grass and start shredding it.

“Like the tear in your skirt yesterday,” he says.

He stands for a long time in the sun. His tail is wound around his leg, the arrowhead shape at the end of it pushing down inside the top of his canvas shoe. They’re pretty worn out, those shoes. 

Finally, he sits down in front of me. “I guess that’s probably what I have to do. It’s like my whole life. Like, I never knew my mother or my father, and all the care homes, some were ok and some were pretty rough, and then Watford was supposed to be this great place where I was this Chosen One to fix everything, but then it all went bad and I’m nothing, now. Just someone who once was someone and all I have is wings and a damn stupid cartoon tail.”

His tail comes around and winds around his arm and he shakes his arm free of it. It swings around behind him and winds around his other arm. “Stupid thing has a mind of its own.” He leaves it there around his arm, and it settles down. He sits down and starts a new pile of grass.

“When I left London, I just flew up as high as I could go – it was the middle of the night – and I wasn’t actually planning on going anywhere, but I got up to where I could see London like a map, all the lights running out from it like they were showing me the way out, and the moon was up and beautiful and far away and orange, so I flew towards it. And it felt like being free. Like leaving a cage behind me.”

I’ve been sorting my grass shreds into little same-length piles. I’m thinking about how I had been calling him and I'm feeling horribly guilty all over again. I didn't really think that through enough. I don't know if I should say anything.

He points at my piles of shreds and says, amused, “You’re organizing bits of dead grass.”

“Indeed I am.”

He spreads his wings and lies back on the grass, looking up at the sky. His tail lets go of his arm and winds around his leg again. “I want to stay here as long as I can. Is that ok?” He puts his arm over his eyes.

“As long as you want.” 

“Really?” He’s motionless.

“Really. Simon, my dear. When Davy left this place to you and you didn’t want it, that’s when we found out about you, when this place was put on the real-estate market. But it has been part of our stead for centuries, we couldn’t let it go, so we bought it. But it’s –” shut up, Susan, take it easy on him. 

Don’t say it’s his, he’s already rejected it. Like it’s too heavy a responsibility.

That tells me more about how hard Davy was on him than anything I’ve heard from the walls. This is about what we owe him, if we’re to live up to our own standards for being a family.

“It’s one of my family’s holdings, and we would all – all my sisters and brothers – we would be glad for you to be here. As much as you want. Come and go as you please.” 

If he asks me why, what do I say. Do I say it’s because it was our Davy, our youngest brother, who gave him bad dreams, and things he can’t stand to think about, and can’t live his life for working so hard to not think about those things. Do I say all that?

And if he asks me how we paid for it, oh dear, that was a dance and a half. We pulled in more than a few favors from around the world. But we’ve done that kind of thing for our friends out there, when we had a surplus. We’re pretty good at building up a surplus. We’ll make it back.

We’re among the lucky ones, on this earth. We have resources, we can pull down resources, we can take care of our own the way we would like to. So many cannot. That’s why me and Bran go out when we can and try to do our little bit to mend the worst of the terrible rips in the fabric of society. Our friends around the world are like that. I wish there were more of us.

This is one of those rips. In the scheme of things, a much smaller one than, for instance, the hundreds of thousands who died in the Balkans, but that doesn’t make his difficulties less important. 

There’s that saying – it takes a village to raise a child. Care homes are the opposite of that, even the best of them: a few overworked adults trying to look after too many children, and not enough money, and all of them are carrying more than their share of troubles.

Davy left Simon at a care home as a newborn, instead of bringing Simon to us, to his family – Eira’s second is about his age – she could have nursed him – what was Davy thinking? Simon doesn’t seem to think of him as his father, clearly. How do I disentangle that? What do I say to him about that? It’s beyond me right now.

I’m holding my breath.

He’s sorting his grass stems into lengths, smallest to tallest.

He looks at me and says, simply, “Thank you.”


	7. Fiona's Kaleidoscope

**~~ Baz ~~**

Several days after the letter from Simon showed up, Fiona came in to wake me up and I fell over when I tried to stand up.

She caught me and eased me down on the bed, then stood over me. "When's the last time you ate anything?"

"Probably something at Penny's last night."

"When, vampire nephew of mine, is the last time you had any blood?"

"Leave me alone."

I didn't want to die. Dying would mean no hope of Simon. I just didn't have anything left over from trying to figure out why he left. Mundane things like hunting squirrels and draining them wasn't going to bring him back. Especially if me draining squirrels was a contributing factor to losing him.

"I can't afford to have my only nephew pine away. I'm perfectly capable of spelling you 'needle and thread gotta get you out of my head' but I know you'd hate me for it. Not that I care, but I'm not sure what would happen if you fought it, probably burn yourself up trying to stop me."

I didn't care what she did. All I had was going into the growing list of what it was about me that made Simon leave, and I was obsessed with figuring it out, as if that would bring him back.

Simon always had his list of things not to think about, I had the B-side list. I got the short end of that stick.

Fiona sat next to me and held her head in her hands. "I'll let you ride in the front seat again..." she said, helplessly.

I was thinking, through a haze, that you can bring a squirrel to a vampire but you cannot make him drink. It actually made me giggle, and Fiona put her hands on my cheeks, bending over me.

"Basilton. You're wrecked. I need to do something about this. I'm not ok about Simon leaving either, but you're wrecked."

"Maybe the numpties will bring me blood with a bendy straw. Give them a call."

"Hey. You're not back in that coffin, you're here with me –"

Fiona says it went through her like a long multiple stroke of lightning: the shift from "Basilton has to go hunting" to "Numpties fed him blood in a cup with a bendy straw" to "Black sausage is made with blood" to "You can go to a butcher and get fresh blood for making your own black sausage" and by that time she was right out the door of the flat.

**~~ Fiona ~~**

I'm halfway to the butcher (in my long leather jacket zipped over my summer pajamas, loafers on bare feet, my hair must be a sight) and I realize I need a better cover story. How much black sausage can two people realistically consume? If I'm going to do this, it's going to be ongoing. And my butcher is pretty much a friend. I don't get that much from him, but he always has a good suggestion when I do wander in. I don't want to be lying to him any more than I have to.

I could go round to a lot of butchers. Spread it around.

That would be a pain in the arse. What I'm going to want is a standing order. Something I can just drop by and pick up. Something so Baz isn't dragging himself out to parks in the pouring rain looking for squirrels and rats. I can't believe this never occurred to anyone before, but raw blood just isn't something you see listed for sale up on the wall.

It'll be just my luck the ingredients for black sausage call for something dried out and baked.

If I get this right, I won't have to shop around: I've got a germ of an idea working, and it's close to the truth, I just don't know enough medical terms, but actually I don't need to. I can claim ignorance entirely truthfully, when it comes down to it.

This quickstep would be exhilarating if it didn't matter so much.

I'm walking into the butcher's. He nods at me and goes back to the young woman he's helping. He's short, broad, red hair going grey around his bald spot, with the eyebrows of a Middle Earth dwarf.

As the young woman goes out the door, I step up.

"Top of the mornin' to ye."

"And to you. I'm hoping you'll be able to help me out. It's my nephew, he's developed what looks to be a kind of blood disease, and it's been suggested that he" – dive into it, Fiona – "drink raw, fresh blood for it."

"Och, aye; me wife has sommat that. How much would ye be wanting?"

My knees go wobbly with relief.

"Well," I'm trying to estimate how much blood is in six squirrels, which I have the vague idea is about his usual, but I'm not sure he's ever said how many, actually. Think milk. One too scrawny twenty year old.

"A quart, maybe? I'm not sure how much he'll want, but I might" – once again I'm throwing myself into the breach – "join him. To make it easier for him." There. That'll justify larger amounts. And ‘might’ doesn't commit me. I just dislike lying. Pitch integrity and practicality, I suppose: too often a lie falls apart and there you are with egg on your face.

"A quart it is." He disappears into his back room, comes back with a quart bottle in a long brown paper wine sack, sets it up on the counter by the till. He looks at me thoughtfully. "Me wife fancies the offal. Organ cuts, that'll build him up if he's poorly. Would ye care to take him –” he goes down to the end of his row of cold cases, pulls out a package wrapped in greaseproof paper. "Country pate with – " he waggles his eyebrows at me "– benefits."

I'm not asking. "I'll try him on it. It's not too strongly spiced, is it? I'm not sure how much his stomach can take at the moment."

"Nay, nay, this is a mild one. If he doesna like it, we'll try another recipe. He'll be the laddie ye've brought here times?"

"Yes, that would be my nephew."

"Aye. Needs building up, for shure."

I pay, and head back to the flat. If it’s right for him, I can set up the standing order tomorrow.

On the way back, I'm feeling how cold the bottle is in my hand. I think I need to do something about that. I have no idea what happens if you try to heat blood up in a sauce pan, but I know blood coagulates in the air. Would heating it even in the bottle change it so it won't work for him? I don't think he'll even know the answer to that one way or the other. There's no "Taking Care of Baby" literature for vampires. All you can find on the internet is literally fiction, hot air useless to my actual vampire boy finding his way in isolation.

I stop on a bench and put the bottle between my thighs. Yeouch, that's cold.

I pull out my phone and search on the first thing that comes to mind, "warm blood song". The first song up is perfect, it's got several different lines to choose from. The singer's Youtube channel has about a million subscribers, that ought to fill the popularity requirement. I'm going with it.

I try casting a couple lines softly. I don't imagine I want too much power in the mix anyways. I think the bottle is less cold. I don't want to overdo it.

Now to try it on the boy.

~~~

When I get there, he's made his way on to the loo. He's leaning on the washstand. I hold out the bottle. "I hope it's a good temperature. It was cold when I bought it, I took a chance on a spell to warm it up a bit."

He's fumbling with it. It has a cap on it like fresh milk, and I get it off for him, kneel down to help him hold the bottle while he takes a sip.

"Where'd you get that?" he asks.

"That Scottish butcher. You've been there with me."

"The one with the dwarf eyebrows?" He takes the bottle out of my hands and downs half the bottle. "A bit chilly, but not bad.” He holds it up to look at it. “One full hell of a lot easier than hunting squirrels."

He stands up, pulling up his pj bottoms, and holds out his hand for the cap. "I'll drink the rest later. What a bunch of numpties we all are. Should have thought of that long ago." He heads out to the kitchen.

That stuff sure took fast in him. I think I've gotten all his weak, I'm having trouble hoisting myself up from the floor where I was sitting.

He comes back into the loo and looks down at me. "Dumber than numpties. They figured it out, didn't they." He puts out his hand and pulls me up.

I'm having another thought. A horrible thought. "Baz. I don't think the numpties figured anything out. Someone must have supplied them, someone who knew."

He's thinking that over, coming to the same conclusion. "We knew that, didn't we? The Mage must have known I was a vampire and told the numpties. Why didn't he use it against me?"

I have no idea. I follow him into the kitchen. I'm thinking about all the years of him hunting rats in the Catacombs. My old hatred of the Mage balloons into new rage. If he knew, he could have seen to putting blood in the kitchen walk-in for Baz. I'm going to kill him next chance I get. No, Simon already did. With Penny. That's half the problem here, I think Simon is on the run from anything and everything to do with Watford, including Baz. And Penny. It's a horrible mess.

He's looking at the bottle that’s set on the island. It's unlabelled, just a plain glass milk bottle, filled with dark red. It's not even gross: just an earlier stage of milk, if you look at it sort of objectively.

Still wouldn't go ordering it in a restaurant.

**~~ Baz ~~**

The first gift that came out of Simon leaving: No more squirrel hunting.

The following morning, once she found I could stand up and talk coherently, Fiona took over my life.

"You're going to class, and you're doing your school work and getting the grades, and you're spending your evenings with me watching stupid comedies, and you're going to bed at 10 pm and staying in it until 6 am, I don't care if you sleep or not. You're not the first and you won't be the last one ever to get ditched by an idiot, so you can wallow all you like, but wallow on the way to class."

She had me text her when I got to class, and when I left. She sent me on errands all over London, and I went because I got it that she was pushing me to keep moving. 

She meant it about the stupid comedies. She picked the ones that had nothing romantic that would set me off into my despair. She found obscure, abysmally bad flicks and got me giggling weakly with her vicious critical commentary. She remixed a number of flicks improvising her own soundtracks, complete with kitchen utensil sound effects. She made herself laugh so hard I'd catch it from her and laugh until my stomach muscles hurt and the tears ran down my face. Often that turned into crying over Simon, weeping with my head in her lap. I couldn't get down into that level of the grief any other way, and it helped.

She collected and enhanced a whole slough of ridiculous hats and put on a newly trimmed one every evening when I came home. Fed me gourmet cooking and precisely warmed blood. Made me wash the all the dishes and clean the kitchen: "Keep you in shape, boyo. Bend and scrub."

She put up a slab of cheap wallboard and hung pictures of the public figures we most despised, and we threw darts at them, and she blindfolded me and made me play pin the nose on the blowhard.

She invented card games and changed the rules on me and made me guess. And changed the rules again. She got me so angry I'd stomp out of the room, and then come back and figure out the twist and whip her arse at her own game.

Every so often, she concocted something tranquil and wonderful. Such as setting out every ceramic bowl, every tumbler and wineglass and teacup, each half full of water, all around the flat, and casting globes of Pitch fire above each one, making the rooms glow with double images of light, and walking me slowly around among them with her arm around me. Moving me forward through a kaleidoscopic, changing, glowing world of magic.

She is the whackiest, lovingest pillar of strength.


	8. Klavdia and Nils Listening Up A Tree

**~~ Klavdia ~~**

Something is going on down at Susan’s, and me and Nils are up the top of the biggest oak tree at the top of the hill east of Bran’s. Nils has all his troll ears out, and I’ve got my quietnet tablet and my little converted headless Dell and the plywood box with the stack of 40 Linux chips and my biggest lithium battery and the two small solar panels because the big one is too big to get up here, and the one meter steerable parabolic reflector with the shotgun mike that I made a year ago when we had the audio gear workshop, which was hard enough to get up here without dinging it, and we are L.I.S.T.E.N.I.N.G.

We haven’t heard much. Goats, and Susan talking with someone with a human male voice but we haven’t made very many words out. There’s too many trees, we can just barely see them walking out from the cottage to the goat pen but it’s between the leaves and it’s pretty far. Nils heard Susan saying the names of her goats, which isn’t too surprising because she probably was pretty loud about it, getting their attention and all.

It’s fun anyways. Everything with me and Nils is fun, except when we get in trouble and lose a lot of privileges, usually our magic focal gear, because that’s usually what we’re doing when we get in trouble.

But then when we can’t do much with magic we just spend a lot of time in bed N.O.T. getting anybody pregnant, or go off hiking in the Cambrians and do a lot of same, or read up on magic and history and espionage at Bran’s, and that’s fun too.

My mother Yana says we spend too much time together and we’re going to get sick of each other, but that is NOT POSSIBLE. We (don’t tell anyone) are handfasted, we did that the month after Nils finally got here after I made him go questing for me before we actually met for the first time face to face (we knew each other from gaming online) when he was 11 and I was 12. We made up our own vows from some we found in Bran’s house and we spelled each other six ways to Thorsday and we can’t possibly get sick of each other, because that’s what we both want. Not to get sick of each other, I mean. So we keep it F.U.N.S.V.I.L.L.E.

So anyways: we’re up the tree, and Nils can hear them talking and we can just see them behind the cottage at the table in Susan’s garden, and I’m just making sure all of the computer connections don’t get blown loose with the tree flexing in the breeze. The reflector is collecting whatever it’s hearing and running it through my code. The Linux box is a really cool parallelized neural network that controls the attitude of the reflector, and I need it because it’s a really faint signal so detecting it takes some serious processing, because it needs to be in real time so it can point the reflector right. We were up all night two nights ago getting it all working after we saw the merdragon for the first time.

We saw it – him – because we were up the tree in the early morning three days ago, just snogging and being silly in the early morning, watching the sun up, then Nils saw the merdragon flying in from the East, dropping down through the mist coming off the fields. I didn’t see him, Nils kept trying to point me in the right direction but then the merdragon dropped down into Susan’s field and I almost fell out of the tree I was so mad that I missed seeing him. So that’s when we started this P.R.O.J.E.C.T. 

Bran thinks we’re recording birds. That is N.O.T. a lie, a merdragon is a kind of bird, right? Anyways, there’s a whole lot of birds getting recorded, so if it just kind of accidentally happens that we find out what Susan is meeting with a merdragon about, well, you know, we’re curious kids. Like, we just accidentally picked up all this stuff they were saying, all innocent like. Right. Like anyone’s going to swallow that for a moment. But it’s worth the risk.

Nils is sitting in front of me, straddling the branch, and I’ve got my right arm around him and my feet on the next branch over – we picked this spot because the two branches are so close and I’ve got my gear screwed down on a skinny piece of plywood that just goes across that I tied down well to the branches, and I can watch the dicier connections.

All of a sudden he’s like, “LOOK, look there he goes!!” and I look, and the merdragon is flying up, up, up ‘til we can hardly see him any more and then he’s coming back down with his wings half folded, he’s like a merlin stooping, ITS SO COOL, and he swoops over the roof of the cottage TOWARDS us and then makes a hard turn north and disappears under the trees and we can’t see him any more

Then we listen for like two more hours and there’s just the sound of voices without enough sound level for words, and we hear Bran going by in the supply truck, so we figure that’s it for the morning and get ourselves and our stuff roped down and go write the code to get the audio I recorded processed and it’s still too faint. I’m going to have get on the internet, I know there’s some serious noise data processing code out there in the astrophysical world, I just never needed it before so now’s the time. 

Nils is finding everything he can on merfolk in Bran’s library. Bran’s library is scattered all over the house because everyone is always taking books everywhere, and its not very catalogued so it’s hit or miss. Nils mostly ignores the stuff about merfolk, after all he is one (don’t tell, no one knows but me) because he says it’s all made up fictional crap (ESPECIALLY the Norwegian troll thing which is beyond hideous), but now we’re curious if anyone ever anywhere was a merdragon. Even a fictional sighting might tell us something.


	9. Fly Fishing in Wales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Or would you spend the rest of your life trying to find a doorway? – Wayward Son, p 159.

**~~ Shepard ~~**

I'm out tracking down Simon. I suggested to Penny and Baz that they keep the home fires burning and do their school work while I do the legwork. They're pretty wrecked by all this.

Since we got here from the States, I've been watching Simon crash into near-catatonia.

Baz and Penny are the greatest, but they are both of them in the top 0.05 percentile academically and Simon hasn't a chance. Nothing he could pick to do in his life would give him equal standing with them, at least in his own assessment, even though they love him and want the best for him. That's my best sense of it, anyways. He's as smart as they are, fundamentally, but they have about a ten years start over him on everything academic and adult. He's spent his life just dealing with crap. 

I'm betting on him landing on his feet.

I think I found the spot. 

As a legal entity, it's a couple thousand acres in Wales owned by a foundation that does agricultural and wild forest sustainability research and education. The kicker is, they're who bought David Llwelyn's cottage and land, which is the northeast corner of the property.

I'm betting on finding a bunch more LLwelyn's up here. One of the foundation's board members is a Llwelyn, Bran Llwelyn, and his website mugshot has enough of a family resemblance to Simon that I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.

Enough to rent a car and fly fishing gear and drive around the perimeter looking for a good stream or two.

I lucked out. They've got a Friends Meetinghouse on the grounds, which is ostensibly open to all, today, Sunday. There's a parking lot just off the numbered route along the western edge, with a long drive leading away to the east and north, a light chain across it. I park and start walking up the hill under the trees, following several well dressed people who are walking up the drive ahead of me.

Ostensibly open to all: they've got a clever warding set up, I'm getting more and more interested in going fly-fishing instead of going to some boring religious service. I expect if you have a standing invitation you wouldn't be affected.

But I can feel the buzz of the warding magic in my arms. So I'm pretending the best fly fishing is ahead of me, not back in the direction of my car, and letting that carry me up the hill under the trees. I expect if you didn't know it was an effect, you'd go back to your car and go fly fishing.

They have some ancient trees around here. If I get the chance, I'm going dryad hunting. Another time. 

If I play this right, I'm making some friends today.

There's a huge old rambling stone farmhouse, whitewashed, centuries of additions sprouting from it, and a long series of farm buildings trailing away down the hill to the east.

The meetinghouse is a newer building on an old stone foundation, the wooden upper half with tall arched windows all the way around.

Inside, it's one big open room, cushioned benches with wooden backs circled in rows around an empty open space. The windows start well up the walls, so that tree tops and the sky above is all you see. It's a beautifully simple design.

I'm early, but there are a number of people here already. I've taken a spot in the back row, and I'm focusing on the back of the bench in front of me trying to be as invisible as a tall Black guy in a sea of blond Welsh folk can be. People come in, ones and twos and small groups, and settle down all around the room. A little blond crazy-haired woman sits herself cross-legged on the bench to the right of me and sets up a row of little puppets on the back of the bench in front of her. She smiles at them and doesn't move again all meeting.

There's a blond kid in front of me. His girlfriend is draped all over him: big blond mid-teen girl who looks Russian. The kid is fascinating.

He's a skinny little guy, but it's his ears that have my attention. Every so often, his ears flicker and turn green-blue, lengthening out sideways like little wings, for a fraction of a second, then they flicker again and go back to looking normal. I'm wondering which is the real thing, the normal ears or the troll ears? I would say he feels pretty comfortable here or he would keep his ears better out of sight.

I've scanned the room twice. Once, at about 10 minutes in: about 60 people here. Bran Llwelyn is in the front row, off to my right. I'm pretty sure he's aware of me, though he's still as a post: I think I caught his eye on me when I looked around. I expect I wasn't supposed to be making it across the warding, so I was probably on the radar before I even sat down. Good.

There's a wider range of folk here than I would have expected in the middle of Wales.

I take a second scan when the latecomers come in at 20 minutes, and the youngest ones go out with a couple of adults. I don't see Simon.

A tall woman of unquestionably African descent with her hair covered Muslim-style in a flaming orange and red patterned scarf which flows around her into her lap, with a pair of clean khaki pants that have farm dirt permanently staining the knees, shoulder to shoulder with a Welsh giant of a man in a sleeveless shirt (clean, but not exactly Sunday finery). He's picking dirt out of his fingernails, and I think most of his attention is in a field somewhere.

Two women in saris, sitting very close to one another.

Four teenagers in a heap on the floor, in front of the Welsh giant, no discernible gender identifications, clothes from the costume room. As silent as everyone else here, mostly motionless, except for one hand tracing circles on the back of the hand of a green and purple mohawked kid dressed like a medieval peasant.

No obvious magickal creatures, other than the kid in front of me.

On the bench next to Bran there are three kids who look exactly like each other at three different ages, and who could well be the offspring of the Welsh giant and the woman next to him. They are barefoot, and they have some kind of silent game going on with fingers lifting and dropping in patterns that might actually be counting in binary. Before I dropped out of school in fourth grade, I used to do that when I already knew everything the teacher was talking about and I was bored out of my skull and I didn't want to get in trouble for doodling.

There are several older couples in relaxed business wear. One woman has a bible in her lap. One older couple, a man and a woman, are both wearing yarmulkes.

One couple is two men in their eighties, not touching, radiating the kind of electric connection I've seen in closeted couples. I think of Penny's flat, of Baz sitting down gingerly on the couch that Simon's been living on, trying to calculate the exact distance that won't get him snapped at, but which lets him be close to the man he loves.

If Simon's not here, this room is full of people I can ask for help finding him.

~~

At the end of Meeting, as people turn to each other shaking hands, all around, and the murmur of greetings rises into conversation and pent up teenage energy bursting out through the doors, Bran gets up and walks over threading between the benches towards me, holding out his hand, smiling in that classic "I wish to appear friendly but who the fuck are you" way. I stand and take his hand for a moment. I've turned my cuff back to let the patterns on my arm show a little, and I see the shock hit him, his smile dropping away. He looks me in the eye, and I say, "I'm looking for a friend. Young guy, dirty blond curly hair, freckles, moles. Wings."

I think I see in his face recognition along with irritation at being taken by storm.

I've nailed it. I smooth down my cuff.

"I'm not here to break up any arrangements he's made, I just want to make sure he has everything he needs, then I'll go away." I say.

He looks at me with an expression that could be consistent with, "beat me to the pass, you young so and so." and says, "I'm sorry, I don't think I know you, have we met before?"

"No, I just came up from your parking lot. I like your warding, if I didn't have experience with such I'd've probably have just gone off fly-fishing."

He gives up and laughs. "You are several laps ahead of me. May we at least exchange names?"

"You're Bran Llwelyn, I've seen you on your website, and I'm Shepard. I'm here from London, and I'm kind of a researcher in things not generally known."

"I'll say. What are your plans for this afternoon?"

I get out one of my cards that's blank except for my number, and write 'Shepard' on it. "I've got a car and some rented fly-fishing gear I'd like to get my money's worth on, but I did want to let you folks know that if Simon needs anything, here's my number, I can scare up anything he needs. One request I do have, is that his friends are pretty cut up about his disappearance, if there could be some kind of communication about his being well and being in a safe place, I'd be glad to arrange a delivery? on Simon's terms, of course. My guess is he's landed on his feet."

That makes Bran laugh out loud. "You might say that. I'd be glad to see what I can do in the way of a communication."

I like the man. He'll admit it when he's been bested, right to my face. This is not the last he'll see of me, but I'm going to scout the territory before I get back to him. People always say England is such a small place compared to the States, and I'm finding that's true. It's only 11:15, I can spend a few hours fly fishing in the stream I saw at the southeastern corner of this property, see if I can find the where the wardings are down there, and still be back at Penny's flat by 9 pm.


	10. Live Forever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A warning: the word suicide comes up, but the opposite happens. Take care.

**~~ Penny ~~**

I miss Simon.

I miss Baz. He's here all the time, he's out there on the couch right now, and all he does is schoolwork. He was here until two am last night, I went to bed at midnight and I was still awake when he turned out the light as he was leaving. He's been doing that for the past two weeks. I know he's hoping to be here if Simon shows up, but I'm here and he just grunts at me. I don't blame him in the least, I just MISS him.

Now Shep has gone off on another search for Simon, and I miss him too. He's mostly been staying at Dev and Niall's, but he's been here every day, nearly, sitting in the Morris chair, and he's just been such a pillar.

He's been here when I get back from class, and he's been reading my textbooks. He says he finds them very interesting. I'm skeptical, because it's just dead boring comp sci, but he's been asking me a lot of questions about my schoolwork, and that is definitely better than hashing over everything about Simon. He said his mother is a software engineer, she builds specialized databases. She sounds pretty interesting.

I miss my purple stone. My mother has it and she won't give it back to me. She's completely furious with me about everything about our stupid trip to America. I wish I hadn't thought of it. She says she cannot believe she raised me, and she's not giving my stone back until I can convince her I'm going to take the responsibility seriously. She's right, and I HATE her.

I probably got off light.

I miss being able to do housework with magic. I miss fixing papercuts with magic. I miss "Fine toothed comb." I hate having to use the indices in books, they never have exactly the word I want, and they NEVER have phrases and I'm always losing track of which page I already looked at.

Baz got his wand back, Fiona and Malcolm fought it out with my mother on the grounds of him needing it to protect himself from goblin attacks. I went and hid in my room. It was pretty scary. Baz is being really sweet about it, he doesn't use it at all. I feel really, really horrible for him.

Enough whining for tonight. I have two chapters of reading and 5 pieces of coding to get through, and the one thing I have in abundance is tons of schoolwork to pull up over my head and blot out missing everything else in my miserable life.

I hope Shep gets here soon. He said he would drop by before going back to Dev and Niall's.

**~~ Shepard ~~**

I'm half way back from Wales and I've pulled over into the parking lot beside a pub to think about this. I've been sitting here a long time. I'm feeling more and more like I totally screwed that up.

I went in with distrust. I walked across that warding that was nothing more than a doorbell, no kind of threat in it at all, and I was so set up by it, big boy confounds the Speaker's magic, that I went into derring-do mode.

All the high stakes life and death action with the Next Blood and Lamb in Vegas and the sheer power of the Speakers that came out of Watford – all that was in my head, and I was expecting the same level of danger and fast footwork up in that enclave on the hill in Wales.

I walked into that Friends Meeting thinking like I was walking into a den of dark creatures masquerading as mild, peace-loving Quakers.

I'm not sure I ever met Speakers who leave the latchstring out. Penny's first reaction when she got her magic back was much more the rule. Straight for the jugular. Tornado exploding in the front seat of my truck.

There has to be a way to mend this. Simon or not, I want to know what kind of Speaker makes those kinds of choices. For a whole community of people: not just one house or one family, but all those different people.

I want to meet all of them and talk to all of them. 

Maybe I'll just drive right back up there and sit in the parking lot. Go sit down on the drive right in the middle of the warding and wait to see what happens. If I sit there all night I might get to see a dryad, those trees along the drive are pretty venerable. That would be worth it.

Maybe that's what they want me to do. Put myself in the line of fire.

No. That kind of thinking is not going to get me what I want most: the trust of the most interesting Speaker I ever met. Someone who has the care of a whole community and puts up a warding I can walk through. He must have more lines of defense. Or maybe he doesn't, but I'm never going to find out if I don't walk right back in and let him see what I'm made of.

I text Penny, "Not going to be by tonight, might have something, probably just some drunk sighting of a pigeon misconstrued as a flying boy-dragon, but I've got an address and I'm going to check it out." That's true as far as it goes. There's no way to do any of this right, just fix what I can and keep on going.

She texts back right away, "go Shep! no sighting here, just Baz making his own sag in the couch. He won't even sit in Simon's."

I'm just a few miles away from the hill when I get a text from Bran, "need bona fides."

I pull over and text back, "I'm on my way back up there right now, about 10 minutes away. I'm sorry I took such a strong line, that was really dumb of me. I should have known better. I'll park in your lot and wait, all night if need be. Let me know what you need from me." I wait.

A couple minutes later I get a text back. "ok"

The sun is going down when I get there.

**~~ Penny ~~**

No Shep tonight either. Poor lone lorn Penny.

I'm going to go sit in Simon's sag on the couch and put my feet on the Morris chair and do my work. It's some kind of company, even if all Baz does is grunt at me. He's probably afraid of starting crying again. It's really scary when he can't stop.

I'm not going to tell Baz about Shep's lead. If it doesn't pan out, I don't want him to crash again.

**~~ Baz ~~**

She's sitting in Simon's spot. I'm glad. I can't stand it being empty, and I can't stand sitting in it myself.

I'm sitting here with my books and my laptop and half the time I'm writing for school and the other half of the time I'm just writing. Everything I can remember about Simon. It hurts like fuck and the sooner I write it the better, because memories fade.

We're all thinking the same thing and no one's saying it.

Like, we all think we're the strong one who can take it and we're protecting the others because we think they can't take it, so we all feel stronger.

Which is actually a good thing, feeling stronger. Any port in a storm.

I keep not writing it. What we're not saying.

So I'm going to write it.

suicide

I feel like all the cold of outer space just flowed through me.

I don't actually think he would. I think he found somewhere to go and went there to get away from that spot on the couch he was stuck in. But that's what I want to think so I don't know whether to believe myself.

Someone once said something. I can't remember who, I feel like I should, but I can't.

They said that if you kill yourself because someone killed themselves, then it's kind of like you're killing them again, because everything you loved about them and remember about them is going to die with you.

I'm fucking living forever. No matter how much it hurts.


	11. Gathering In

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rewrite. Same saliences, irrelevancies subtracted, result: cranked up the pace. I like it better, anyways.

**~~ Shepard ~~**

When I pull into the parking lot, it's mostly empty of cars, but there's a group of people – half a dozen – up at the northern end. I wasn't expecting this much of a crowd. I realize I'm grinning with curiosity, and wipe the grin off my face.

I park and walk over. Bran is sitting in a camp chair, and nods to me, waving his hand at the empty camp chair next to him. "Shepard," he says. I nod back and say, "Bran."

There are five other people here besides Bran. One is the little crazy-haired woman who sat next to me in meeting; she's sitting cross-legged on the grass to my right. She gives me a wide, friendly smile as I sit down.

Beyond her, the Welsh giant and the woman in the flame patterned headscarf are sitting together on the low, flat-topped wall that borders the parking lot. She's wearing a big knitted shawl, but he's still in his sleeveless shirt. I wonder if he runs hot like Simon.

There's two more women, one sitting on the wall, the other standing beside her glaring at me. The one with the glare looks very much like Bran and the Welsh giant.

I've stirred up the whole bunch of them, and my guess is they are here to see what I'm made of.

And here comes one more, walking fast across the field. She's in a long dark grey skirt down to her ankles, and a shawl of the same material. She looks even more like Bran than the rest of them.

Bran says, "Here's Susan. Shepard, you're to be treated to a Llwelyn family Meeting for Clearness, which nominally operates on a consensus basis but tonight we don't have all night so it will go swiftly to a vote once people have had their say. Roberts Rules, more or less."

He glares around the circle of his family. "We'll start with a few minutes of silence, which it is my hope you will all use to consider the important issues on which we do have consensus, and whether any of your disagreements which we have been hashing over since meeting this morning are actually worth more of your breath."

He nods at me, rather apologetically, and drops his eyes to contemplate the grass at his feet.

From my right, I catch a grin from the little crazy-haired woman that is openly full of delighted, even gleeful anticipation. I think, "That one's an ally. Perhaps even from the first, when she came and sat next to me in meeting this morning. Where did that come from?"

I'm feeling much the same: gleeful anticipation. I'm going to get to know far more about this group than I had any right to expect.

Just beyond, the Welsh giant has his arm around the woman in the flaming headscarf. They're focused on the same spot in the grass.

One, two, three.

Four is the woman in grey, who is now standing on the wall, overlooking all of us. Her skirt sways as she rocks a little on her feet. Her face gives nothing away, but my guess is she came here in a hurry from a distance, on foot, and she'll be off away the moment she feels she can.

Five: the woman sitting on the edge of the wall. She's looking at me with a small smile, watching me look around at her family. She's not a Llwelyn, she looks Russian or Polish. Eastern European. She looks like she could be the mother of the teenage girl who was sitting on the bench in front of me this morning, wrapped around the boy with the imperfectly concealed troll ears.

And the sixth, the woman standing on the grass, hand on the shoulder of the Eastern European woman. She's wearing leggings and a big cabled sweater, and she's looking down at the grass with annoyance. Her hair is rigorously braided and coiled in a coronet on her head.

I can't wait to hear what this is all about. I think they're quite possibly more concerned with figuring me out than with concealing their business from me.

I've really only got two indications that there is magic in use around here: the wards I walked through this morning, and the imperfectly concealed troll ears on the boy in meeting.

Earlier I made an assumption that Bran is a Speaker. He took my mention of the warding in stride: but that doesn't mean he put it there. I need to drop that assumption.

One more big, messy question. Simon, wings and all, would be splashed all over the internet by now if he had landed almost anywhere. Anywhere, that wasn't a place with similar secrets to preserve.

I don't think this is a group like the Next Blood. That's been one of the unspoken thoughts in Penny's flat: I'm sure we each have thought it, and it has been on my mind as I've tried, over the past two weeks, to figure out the most likely places to look for Simon. 

But these people are so open: their grounds, their Meeting for Worship just barely warded with a polite disinvitation, and, well, they certainly aren't wearing this year's Desert Storm boutique fashions kitted out with machine guns. But the big shawls could be hiding – it's an evening up in the highlands, it will get cool, that's the most likely reason for shawls.

And where would a person like the little crazy haired woman next to me fit into a Next Blood organization? Not to mention all the diversity in meeting this morning. The wild variety of teenagers. The (speculatively) gay couples. The troll ears fading in and out.

I look up, and catch the eyes of the woman in grey – Susan – on me. She gives me a grave bow, smiling a little.

Oh, joy. All sorts of questions.

I look down into the middle of the circle, and try to work out what fundamental issues I have in common with these people. Ones I could be in consensus with them on.


	12. Spin and gone, gone, gone

**~~ Simon ~~**

I've been here by myself most of the day, Susan got a call from someone just before lunch, and went off saying she'd be back by supper, if not before.

It's been a lovely day. I've just sat around spinning and it's not lonely at all, it's like she and her smile are all woven into this place. It's like Ebb's barn – but I don't go too far that direction, I break my thread and have to fix it and by the time I'm done I'm just back here spinning. Nothing in me but spinning.

For a while I went out and played with the buck and his wether friends. They're in their own warded field, a stronger warding, goats are willful. We ran around in circles in the field and I got well worn out. Then I tried to remember some of Susan's stretches, and the goats kept butting in and nibbling me, and I got laughing just because. Laughing because I was laughing and so were the goats. Laughing because I was laughing because I was laughing and the goats were laughing too and nibbling me.

Then I went and dug some in the plot we're turning over for more garden.

Then I washed all the dirt off me and got out my spinning for a while more.

Susan wasn't back so I heated up stew and made a big stack of bread and butter, and then she came in for a little bit and ate, before she had to go back up to whatever's going on up in the other part of wherever this is. It's in Wales, anyways, plenty far enough from everything for me to...

For me to get different, I guess. For me to learn how to spin, which the wonderful thing about it is when I'm spinning I don't have to not think – it's not something I have to do all the time, push everything away like I'm holding back an avalanche that just keeps coming down on me if I don't hold it back.

I spin, and the spinning takes up so much of my mind that everything else goes away. Just gone.

I love that. It's such a relief to have all of it be gone, gone, gone.

Every so often a little scrap comes back, like Ebb's barn – that's a scrap that I know leads to a big chunk of the avalanche, so I figure I'll probably at some point have to figure out how to clear up that somehow – but definitely not right now. 

Maybe I'll get lucky and not have to at all. Maybe. 

I sort of doubt it but if I focus on keeping the thread going, on that lovely twirling slipping line that I get to roll up into a fatter and fatter lump of finished thread, nothing else gets into me.


	13. Seven Points of View

Seven Points of View

**~~ Shepard ~~**

During the five or so minutes of silence, I’ve come up with a whole list of things we might have consensus on: eating good food; the beauty of the sky; a place to live in peace; the value of friendship; having interesting questions to explore in one’s life. And a lot more.

It gives me a sense of fellowship with these people; I’m sure most of my items would be on their lists.

Bran straightens up, sighs, says: “To begin: there is only one item of business to decide: whether to pursue Shepard’s request to take a small note of reassurance from Simon back to his friends.”

He looks around the circle. “Then there’s everything else that has come up since meeting for worship ended this morning. We’ll be here all night if we get into all that, but, well, everyone has a position to air.”

“I’m going to ask you introduce yourselves briefly for Shepard who is largely in the dark as to who we are, and to keep your comments brief, and end by letting me know if you are opposed or not opposed to our single item of business. Izara?”

The woman in the flame headscarf nods sharply. She’s not looking at me.

“I am Izara. I have come a long, long path from when I was a child in the Bahr el Ghazar, in South Sudan, where my family was slain by raiders who came with a sound in my ears like a swarm of marauding wasps and left only me alive because they couldn’t see me. I have made my way north making money in the streets pretending to be a charlatan of magic, and when I came finally to this place, here, I felt far enough away to stop my running.” 

“This morning a swarm of wasps came up our hill and came into our meeting house. I know nothing more of this man except that it is he who brought this swarm with him.”

“It is just two weeks after the other person arrived here and we know not enough of the intentions of either of them, and I am entirely opposed to his being here or to granting any request he may make of us.”

She has not looked at me, and she seems as much distressed as angry. 

I think of how my arms buzzed to the warding as I pushed past it: that must be what she is hearing, and I have opened an old, old wound in her and I had no idea that I might be doing that.

If I knew how to turn my arms off I would. I don’t know how. I feel badly for her – I wish I had known. I’ve lost the sense of peace that I had.

The Welsh giant has his arm around Izara. He says, “I am Haf – h, a, f. My wife Izara and I are researchers here, as well as farmers and foresters. Izara paid her own way using her skill at sleight of magic and hand, through her completion of her studies in Benghazi in political science, through her degree in sustainable agriculture in the south of France, and then another in the botany of boreal forests, when she lived near Brest.”

Izara mutters something about irrelevancies, and Haf says, “You are much too modest, so I’m filling in for what you didn’t say.” 

She says, “Well, then, tell your education too.” 

“Oh, just my undergraduate degree in forestry, and a PhD I dropped out of because I was much more interested in the research we do on our farm, than in the writing. I am a farmer, and a blacksmith, and a forester, and my wife and I host learners who work with us on our research projects.”

He looks down then, and says, “I don’t hear the swarm of wasps that Izara hears, but I understand what it communicates to her, and I am opposed.” 

There’s a silence. One of the women who is sitting on the wall looks over at me, speaks in a strong Eastern European accent.

“I am Yana. I grew up in Georgian Caucasus, then I lived in Chersky Mountains, in eastern Siberia, and now I live in Wales. I work as one member of a consortium who build computing leveraged by magic. I am committed to communication and open access for information. I am not opposed to Shepard’s request.” She gives me a brief smile, then goes back to studying the grass at her feet.

The woman standing at Yana’s shoulder says, “I am Eira Llwelyn. We are all Llewlyns here, though you forget to say it! This place is where I grew up, and where I do my work, biochemistry and genetic research. Like Izara, I hear the swarm Bran’s guest brought with him. I am opposed not only to granting any request from Bran’s guest, but also to the presence in our stead of Susan’s guest.”

She says guest as if it were its opposite: invader. 

The little crazy-haired woman to my right says, “It’s getting a bit dark, isn’t it.” She digs in a pocket, pulls out a little folded piece of cloth, holds it out on her palm.

A small column of light, dancing a little like a flame, shoots up from it, and she tosses the flame to land in the middle of our circle, to waver and bow and stand up again to light the loose circle of faces. Pointy nose shadows run flickering across people’s foreheads.

“I am Sara Llwelyn. Among us, I’m the principal reader of the wards, and I’ve been listening to them since the first ping at, oh, it would have been 10:45-ish this morning.” 

“I was just then leaving home to go up to meeting, so I ran across the road to see what I could see, and I saw this young person walking up our drive, so I followed him.” 

She looks up at me. “It was rude of me not to catch you up and introduce myself, but you made such a commotion crossing our wards that I felt I ought rather to hang back and see what I would be coming up against.”

She rocks forward to hunker on the balls of her feet. I can see just the half of her face in the light.

“Personally, I liked what I saw in Shepard. I do not think he brings us harm.”

Eira says, confrontationally, “Just from following him?”

“Yes. But that’s just my opinion.” She waves her hand at the single flame, and it splits into three shorter columns, bending out away from each other before shooting up a few tapering inches into the night.

“So, what do the wards have to say about all this. I’m going to remind you all of the little real estate agent, that interaction with our wards.”

Bran puts his head in his hands. Yana puts her hand over her mouth and starts laughing.

Eira huffs noisily, gets up on the wall, lies down on her back behind Yana and puts her arm over her eyes.

Susan, dim and tall in the dark beyond Eira and Yana, says “Oh, Sara, yes, I do see your point.” There’s laughter in her voice.

Sara looks up at me. “Shepard doesn’t know that story, so I will tell you.”

“Last year, when Davy’s cottage and the land around it were on the market, a real estate agent came and parked in the lot here, started walking up the drive. He was turned back by our lost-interest ward: I heard it pinging and ran over to hide in the hedgerow, and his car had the logo of the firm he worked for, so I knew he was a real estate agent.”

“He got stuck in a loop. He kept going back to his car, getting in, turning it on, turning it off, going back up the drive, and getting turned back again, over and over, and I’m sitting in the hedgerow, trying to figure out what to do. Because it isn’t just the lost-interest ward that’s going off, it’s a lot of the older wards that are buried all around.”

Bran interrupts. “Sara and I mapped them years ago – ran transects north-south, east-west, across our whole stead and pinged the wards so we could hear where they are strongest.”

“Yes, that was my teenager project,” says Sara. “This is how I read the thing with the real estate agent. He must have had some plan for our place, some intention that might have meant taking out all our buildings and works and trees and fields, perhaps for a tract of McMansions with golf courses, and the wards took that to be a menace to us.”

“But what is also important, and why I choose that story, is he didn’t actually have any effective weapons to put his intentions into force – no weapon of mass real-estate terraforming – no giant earth-moving machinery in his boot – so he just got bounced back and forth between his intention and our lost-interest ward, with the old wards booming away at me like they were hearing an attacking army in our parking lot, but not doing anything stronger to drive him out.”

Yana is hooting with laughter, and Eira has rolled over with her back to me, but I think she is laughing too.

Sara says, “See, Shepard, this is the deal. We’d very much prefer not to have to use magic to change people’s minds, it’s such an invasion of a person’s privacy and it just doesn’t feel right. So we compromise by setting up a ward that simply acts on a person’s own motivations, finding one that’s headed away from us and amplifying that.”

“But this poor guy, he got stuck between two poles, his own strong intentions and our ward finding some other interest of his to turn him back. Maybe just a drink at the pub, or the next stop on his route, or something that didn’t actually get him to leave altogether. So he just kept on, back and forth, back and forth.”

Haf is chuckling, but I’m not hearing anything from Izara.

“So I’m sitting there in the hedgerow, agonizing over what to do about this, and finally I just throw caution to the winds and spell him **Get the fuck out of here** and **Don’t you dare come back** and he goes out of here like a bat out of hell and I’m casting after him as he goes down the road.”

She’s pantomiming pulling spells out of a quiver on her back, throwing them into the darkness behind me. 

Bran is laughing too. He wipes his eyes and says, “Sara. We see your point. Could you just give us your position on our single item of business?”

“Not opposed.” She waves her hand at the column of light, and it drops again, splitting into six.

Now everyone has six little pointed nose shadows flickering across their foreheads. It’s disorienting. 

Susan says, from the shadows beyond the light thrown by the little flames, “I am Susan Llwelyn. Nothing tonight has shifted my views, not since Bran first called me up and told me of all this.” Eira sits up, and Susan goes on, “Yes, Eira, I know you feel that if you’d been first to speak to me it would be different, and I disagree.”

“I’ve got a young man with a distressing and complicated past in my care, and evidently he’s ghosting his friends, which I didn’t realize until today.”

“I’m going to go see about getting a note for you, Shepard, and I’ll be finding out as well what Simon’s view of the whole matter is. You should know that I don’t expect he’ll be wanting his friends to take him back to his previous life, he’s been very clear about wanting to stay here, where I do have a home to share with him.”

I look up at her, wondering if I get to say anything at all here.

“I’d like to do this on Simon’s terms as much as possible, which is what Bran tells me is also your hope.”

I nod. That’s enough. I couldn’t add anything more.

She nods back at me, smiles, and turns away, dropping down off the other side of the wall where she has been standing. From the dark she says, “I know what your vote is, Bran, so I’ll be going.”

I can’t see her at all now, the flame is too bright.


End file.
